Dear Purdue Board of Trustees,

Purdue University is failing its students. Housing has grown scarcer and more expensive. Public transportation has suffered cut after cut. Healthcare prices continue to rise while food quality continues to fall. Amidst all of this, Purdue pockets tens of millions of dollars in budget surplus every year. Every student at Purdue is affected by this crisis.

Purdue does not just fail to meet the standards of a prestigious university. They fail to provide the bare minimum standards for all their students.

The student body at large has found Purdue University’s handling of a variety of pressing student life issues lacking in ways that fail to support the University's most important resource: the students themselves. Some of these mishandled issues surround the housing crisis, public transportation, healthcare, food insecurity, and financial transparency.

While much of Purdue’s financial data is publicly available, the way in which it is presented and written renders it difficult to comprehend or inaccessible to the average Purdue University student or community member.

The Purdue dining ecosystem is unwelcoming to those with dietary restrictions. Vegan and kosher options are frequently entirely absent from campus locations, while vegetarian and halal options are often only available at a single location.

CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Services), while recently receiving increased funding to become fully-staffed, still often leaves students with unreasonably long wait times for appointments if there is a spot at all, and is still generally understaffed to provide for the needs of the student body. Purdue also recently switched to AffirmedRx as a pharmacy partner, which caused hundreds of medications previously in the “preventative” category to be switched to the “non-preventative” category, drastically raising prices for Purdue employees.

As of this year, the bus system that provides transportation around campus has been changed from Citybus to SP+, raising a variety of problems for students that relied upon the old system. Many students that lived off campus (with the expectation of the transportation standing as it was) were abruptly hung out to dry with little warning and had to scramble to find alternate forms of transportation to get to school, work, and grocery stores.

Mold and brown water show up in residence halls often, and these cases are frequently improperly handled by Purdue University. Rusty pipes that have not been properly maintained cause several residence halls to repeatedly deal with brown water, and mold is often merely painted over instead of properly removed. Students also often face unreasonable delays in remedying these problems when they occur, lowering the quality of their living conditions below what is expected and paid for. Purdue University has also recently switched to a lottery system for acquiring on-campus housing, impacting students with disabilities or financial aid the most.

We, the undersigned, therefore demand:

Financial Transparency Now

We demand that Purdue report their profits and losses in an easily accessible format to students and the public.

Fight the Housing Crisis

We demand that Purdue University take steps to address the student housing crisis, including ending overcrowding, improving dorm conditions, and constructing new affordable housing for students.

Food Security For All

We demand that Purdue increase the number of vegetarian, kosher, and halal options on campus, as well as immediately end its contract with Aramark.

Restore Our Transportation

We demand that Purdue University increase route coverage to former levels and fully subsidize buses for students.

Fund Affordable Healthcare

We demand that Purdue University substantially increase funding to CAPS and that the university fully covers increased prescription costs caused by the change in benefit partners.

Across the nation, universities have shown what competent administrations can achieve when listening to their students' demands. At the University of Texas at Austin, the administration launched a pilot program to “help low- and middle- income students pay for on-campus housing costs.” In a campaign at NYU, students successfully got their administration to divest from Aramark, the same private food-provider company that Purdue uses. SFSU gave their students access to free transportation throughout the Bay Area. At the University of Arizona, students receive comprehensive health care at their Campus Health center, including services like urgent care and mental health counseling.

Conditions for Purdue students only worsen with every passing day. We can only stop this trend by taking action together to fight for the wellbeing of all students.

Sincerely,
Purdue Students