Base parking on seniority and good grades

To the editor:

Southeast Missouri State University has taken an important issue in the students' quality of life and come up with the most awkward and unhelpful of solutions.

The problem: too many students want to park on campus. The solution: a lottery to randomly assign spots. The assignment of classes is not done on a lottery basis but rather by seniority. Why are parking spots not assigned the same way?

An even better solution would be to make on-campus parking a variable of grades. First-semester freshmen would not get the privilege of parking on campus. After the first semester, if they made grades, they could have a car. The GPA required would be extremely high, a 3.8 for example. With each semester as they neared graduation the GPA requirement would be a little lower as the student gained seniority. In this way, the seniors still would have the privilege of being seniors, and the underclassmen could drive after they had proven themselves. In this way the on campus parking would be limited, and SEMO would not have to spend any money or go through with the idiotic lottery.

Remember that the students are there for an education. If they can't make the grades, they should be concentrating on that and not the other various and sundry aspects of their lives which would require a car.

JIM BESHER

Cape Girardeau