The Downtown campus has a total of 19,041 students enrolled this fall. Many ASU faculty members and local business owners are happy about this increase and see various benefits for students as well as the downtown community.
“It’s very exciting to see this campus grow,” said Liz Smith, outreach director for the Walter Cronkite School, “not only for the community down here that’s burgeoning and finding its own identity, but also in the sense that more people means we are going to have more of an impact on the community that surrounds us.”
Smith believes this increase will bring more money into the local economy; the Downtown campus is cultivating a highly educated and skilled workforce that is more accessible to employers. Her hope is that fewer students will leave Phoenix, because it is getting more desirable to live downtown.
“The urban lifestyle means not driving a half an hour or more to your job,” Smith said. “As the campus grows, people may begin to live here and walk to work. Then the culture will grow.”
Scott Schraml, the owner of the Mojo Bowl food truck, believes that the increase in students will benefit his business as well as other food trucks downtown.
“College students are one of my target customer groups,” Schraml said, “but they make up less than 20 percent of my customers.”
Schraml hopes the increase in enrollment will bring more students to local businesses because students are very receptive to new food concepts. His goal is to decrease the number of students skipping meals or “popping energy drinks” and encourage them to fuel their bodies with nourishing food, he said.
With exams and the changes in weather, Schraml has utilized social media to attract students of the Cronkite School to his business. In his opinion, $5 smoothies from Mojo Bowl are cheaper, relatively faster and more mobile than the standard restaurant meal. He wants students to think of the food trucks as a “mobile food court.”
A large goal, according to Smith, is awareness and integrating students into the Phoenix community.
New approaches like the Discover Phoenix series and the Urban Devil app encourage students to come downtown, offering discounts and listing special events specifically for ASU students.
Some Taylor Place residents said downtown housing has played a large part in the increase in numbers.
“We have a really diverse community,” journalism freshman TreNesha Striggles said. “I will definitely live here next year.”
Journalism senior Danielle Gregory said the combination of the Cronkite School and the creation of the light rail have helped downtown’s numbers grow.
“The U-Pass is a great price because I commute from Tempe four days a week and parking is too expensive,” Gregory said.
Exercise and wellness sophomore Eric Abulencia said the Downtown campus is becoming distinguished with time. He said that as the campus becomes more recognized, people are more likely to take classes on the Downtown campus.
Now that numbers have increased, students like Abulencia and Gregory have expressed concerns about class size and overcrowding in student centers.
Gregory said there is a need for more seating in the First Amendment Forum and Cronkite Library. She believes a bigger computer lab would benefit students working on videography and photography projects, as opposed to the more common method of sneaking into empty classrooms.
She also hopes that more courses will be offered in the future, because her classes often overlap and she has four-hour blocks of downtime in between classes.
Abuencia said classes for his major have become more crowded. However, Smith said the class-size limit will not change for journalism students in skill classes because of the limit on 20 computers per room.
Contact the reporter at nbarret1@asu.edu
Editor’s note: Danielle Gregory has written a story for the Downtown Devil as a contributing reporter. She was not involved in the reporting of this story.
