Small towns have their charm. Everyone knows everyone and the sense of community is palpable, whereas people in big cities tend to get lost in the shuffle.
The same argument could be made about universities. In a perfect world, when students apply for college, they seek an environment where they know they will learn well. Smaller schools attract students who crave that small-town vibe, and students who end up at bigger schools sought out that bustling environment.
More often than not, though, students end up at the campus that’s the easiest to get to. This is especially true for state schools such as ASU, which draws its population largely from local schools.
With an ever-growing population of hundreds of thousands of students spread across four campuses, local high school students may wind up at a university that’s too big for them to handle.
ASU will get even bigger this fall with the opening of a new 70-student Lake Havasu City Campus. The campus will host undergraduate programs in communications, psychology, life sciences, organization leadership and general studies.
City officials have already noted new businesses opening in the town in anticipation of the coming student consumers and hope Southern Californians hop over to the Arizona side of the border for college.
As ASU, NAU and UA grow each year, the small college option isn’t an option at all. While ASU’s growth has been a point of pride for students and the administration, the fact remains that increasing Tempe’s population means bigger crowds, bigger classes, more daredevil fixies zipping through clogged streets and along campus paths, and rare one-on-one interactions between students and professors.
A university with many campuses can provide an education to students living all over the state while not overly burdening the family paying for that student’s college education. Lake Havasu City is half Tempe’s population and needed to fill a vacant, 70,000-square-foot junior high.
Though little has developed, ASU is also exploring an option for a campus in Payson – another small town with more than 15,000 residents where college-bound high school graduates face high moving and living costs.
If the number of students attending the Havasu campus this year increases the same way the population at the Downtown campus has since it opened in 2009, a small-town campus with a student body to match will be even less of an option for students.
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