tl;dr The campus is beautiful but with poor manage...

tl;dr The campus is beautiful but with poor management and overzealous expansion.

Now the long version, I am a Flagstaff local and attended NAU for two years before leaving for literally anywhere else. The school has a great grounds-keeping department and whoever is in charge of the gardening deserves the highest praise as the whole place looks great.

The actual running of the college though I can only assume was left to a team of highly trained orangutans... tuition is overpriced but that is a problem with all universities now, the biggest issue is the ridiculous cost of things like housing, parking, and other "nickle and dime" items. A parking pass for the year costs as much as a course in it's own right and even if you have one good luck finding a spot as most of the parking lots have been removed (more on that in a second). Unless you live in the over-priced and under maintained campus housing then expect to either ride the bus or bike onto campus in two feet of snow.

The source of many of NAU's problems comes from it's overzealous admissions department, the college had 21,000 students at it's Flagstaff campus last year (almost a third the population of the town itself) and the bureaucracy of the school is not able to handle the strain. Classes are often huge and many times student's cannot get into the class they need or ending up with an over worked professor who doesn't have time to offer any of the personal attention that usually sets them apart from a k-12 teacher. On-campus housing is also a joke as in a mad rush to get more students (read tuition income) new dorms and apartments are being thrown up left and right with no regard for planning or quality often replacing existing buildings or as previously mentioned tearing up much needed parking lots.