When Morgan Meilinger and Kimi Wolford arrived at their dorm room on Aug. 16, they thought they were going to have a normal dorm room like most other freshmen at Georgia Tech. What they didn’t know is that for the next nine months, they would be living in a converted lounge.
“I really wasn’t a big fan of it. I wanted to be in a regular room. And I also wanted to be on west campus. And I had put in like six dorm choices on west campus and I ended up in like not even a room on east campus,” Meilinger said.
In his Aug. 19 Convocation address, Georgia Tech President Bud Peterson said this year’s freshman class consists of 3,070 students enrolled. This is an increase of about 420 from last year’s class, and the “largest and most diverse class ever,” Peterson said. The unexpected increase in students is causing difficulties at the university.
The first indication to students that there was a problem was when dorm assignments were not posted on Tech’s website, “Buzzport,” in early July, as promised. Gradually students started to learn, by attending July orientation programs, that the reason was an extra 300-plus freshmen, causing a room shortage.
Eventually, the dorm assignments were published, but some students, like Meilinger and Wolford, noticed an L next to their room number. They also received an email stating that they would be living in a lounge, instead of a dorm room, but not to worry. When they got to campus, they found that virtually every lounge in a freshman dorm had been converted to a dorm room.
So far, the students seem to be taking it well.
“I think I honestly like being in the four-person room though, because you have more room to walk around; even though you may not have more room for your stuff, there’s more room to walk around. It’s kind of nice,” Wolford said.
Another freshman, Sarah Lynn Bowen, also expressed a positive perspective though slightly different than Wolford’s.
“It was really kind of cool to be, you know the first, there’s never been such a big freshman class, and that was really really cool, because I’m a part of that; I’m a part of what’s never been before,” Bowen said.
When asked whether they thought the large class size was a positive or negative, the students seemed conflicted.
“Personally it’s more people for me to compete with and that’s negative, you know it’s more people for me to be you know fighting against for jobs, for grades, for the curve,” Bowen said. “But at the same time it’s more people bringing more ideas to Georgia Tech, and to my classes, and to my major, and it’s more ways that Tech can be even further improved.”
“Yeah and I think its also a good thing because it shows a great reflection on like our class, and you know the classes that graduated in 2012. It shows that we do have a lot of qualifications and stuff, and I think that’s really cool,” Wolford said.
Wolford is actually correct. President Peterson emphasized in his Aug. 28 Institute Address that the freshman class is “the largest, best qualified, and most diverse freshman class in Georgia Tech history.”
The average GPA in the freshman class is 3.89 and more than half of the class maintained a 4.0 GPA in high school. This class includes students from 65 countries while last year’s class only represented 41 countries. It is also 35 percent female, the largest number of women ever enrolled at the school.
In an email regarding the surge in freshmen students, Richard A. Clark, the Director of Admissions, said that a “higher yield than historical trend data predicted” was the cause. “Georgia Tech has never been a more desirable choice for students. Our student loan debt is 20% lower than [the] national average and our average starting salary is two times the national average. Thus it stands to reason that yield is up and we will plan on that for [the] year ahead,” he wrote.
While the students may not all notice a difference resulting from the class size, the teachers do.
“I often get about 280 kids in my classes, and what I do, I just talk really loud, and just try to tell better jokes to keep their attention. I don’t get stressed over large class sizes, but I think a lot of teachers do,” Dave Goldsman, a professor at Tech for 28 years, said.
Things are going to have to be changed at the school to accommodate the influx of students. The broken seats in classrooms will have to be repaired, and the standards for getting into the school might become more difficult.
“I think what’s gonna happen is that our department, as well as Georgia Tech, are going to start making adjustments that make it harder and harder to get into the school. I have a feeling that we’re going to make the classes harder and Georgia Tech is going to make the criteria harder to try to transfer in,”Goldsman said. “So, I think that this problem, one way or another, is going to go away.”
