By Joanna Passalaris

Every year Denison changes some aspect of campus life for better or worse. One of this year’s changes was the new freshman only quad, which created an entirely new parking plan. While not the biggest problem in the world, getting a parking spot near my quad isn’t a guarantee. Enough students complained that the school had to send an email about it (not to say they would change anything, just that an increased walk is not a big deal). Regardless, I was curious to see which students hate the new parking plan the most.

I know other seniors with cars who are upset with the parking plan and believe that it heavily favors the freshmen. Freshmen used to have to park in Ebaugh lot, but now can park up the hill in a lot previously used by sophomores and juniors. Below, Figure 1 shows how students feel about parking (on a 0-100, cold to warm scale) across class years. Overall the parking sentiment is pretty negative (campus mean is 25.8), rarely getting above the halfway mark. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors all have similar averages around 13 to 18. Seniors, though, have a narrower distribution. The warmest responses are only around 60, barely a positive sentiment. Meanwhile, sophomores and juniors have responses around 75, and oddly one junior thinks parking is perfect. The differences across class years are likely due to a feeling of entitlement that the school did not respect. Seniors, being the oldest class, feel like it’s their time to have the perfect parking and feel the most cheated by the new policy.

Even though the average response for freshmen is higher than the other grades, it is still not overwhelmingly positive. The new parking policies are a vast improvement for freshmen than previous years, but the freshmen don’t know this. This inability to compare it to previous years probably pulls the score down more. Regardless, the scores are still on average higher than the other grades, so parking might not be as much of a challenge for them.

All this being said, grade isn’t the actual variable that is causing the differences in scores. Someone doesn’t dislike campus parking more just because they are an upperclassman. It’s that upperclassmen tend to live on quads with smaller parking lots with fewer spaces. Below in Figure 2 you can see that East Quad has more positive feelings about parking and the distribution is identical to the freshman boxplot in Figure 1 (all freshmen live on East Quad). North and South are predominantly sophomores and juniors with a few seniors. This is why the distributions from the two figures match pretty well.

The key difference here is West Quad, where most of the seniors live. Not only does it have the lowest average, most of the data is densely packed around this point, rarely going past 25. Once the data gets over 50, a positive view on parking, the six data points are outliers. While there may be some seniors simply bitter that their senior parking isn’t perfect, this is not the only thing driving these results. The West Quad distribution portrays a more negative sentiment than the senior one. The West Quad lot is big but not enough to accommodate all the students with cars. So the seniors who live there view the new parking plan negatively.

Parking and its perceived fairness is always a pain point, but this year’s reshuffling amplified this. With all the dislike for the new parking map, will the school continue with this policy? Will the school listen to student complaints or simply send another email reassuring everyone that a longer walk is good for their mental health?

Joanna Passalaris is a senior Cinema major and a DPR minor at Denison. She tends to reread the same books and rewatch the same movies instead of trying something new.