Leading up to this week's fatal parking garage collapse, the Miami Dade College Doral campus was experiencing a massive enrollment boom, which is why the school was spending more than $22 million dollars on a parking garage in the first place.
According to The Miami Herald,
In the spring of 2006, MDC’s West Campus opened its doors, serving a modest 150 students. Today, more than 8,000 attend classes there, making West Campus easily the fastest-growing of MDC’s eight campuses.
The school is growing so quickly largely in part because the city surrounding it has also been exploding.
According to the Herald, "Doral became its own city in 2003, and the city’s population has roughly doubled to nearly 50,000 in the past decade" and city officials have partnered with the local MDC campus during that time.
Not only were there a lot of students flooding MDC's classes, but the school is a commuter school, which means that the thousands of students that go to that campus have to take a car there, or rely on the limited public transportation offered.
