Recently, Penn State has started making renovations to its 325 on-campus elevators.

The changes include adding emergency phones at a cost of $7,000 per elevator.

Officials are also working to upgrade existing phones and change the emergency procedure for students who are stuck in trapped elevators.

These are, of course, very positive moves. But they are moves that could take several more years to complete.

They are adjustments that are taking place as a result of code changes, not from the death of Katherine Ibanez, said Penn State's environmental health and safety director.

The 21-year-old Penn State student died 14 months ago after falling about 40 feet down an Atherton Hall elevator shaft while trying to exit the elevator that was stuck between floors.

But, if they aren't about Ibanez, maybe they should be.

It's unfortunate that it often takes a tragedy to bring light to problems, such as elevator safety.

It's even more unfortunate when it takes more than a year to start to make infrastructure safer.

Perhaps if the elevators were maintained all along, there wouldn't have been such a push right now to make changes.

And these are changes that are in dire need. Since the start of the semester Penn State University Police has said it received two to three calls per week from students stuck in elevators.

While it is good to see that more students are learning how to deal with these incidents in a safer way, it is still troublesome to see that so many elevators are getting stuck.

Moreover, this is evidence that these elevators are aging -- and malfunctioning -- quite quickly.

Penn State's oldest elevators, in Borland Lab, date back to 1932.

Now seems to be the age of construction for Penn State, as new, state-of-the-art buildings are popping up on campus all the time.

The Information Sciences and Technology Building and the new Life Sciences Building are the two most prominent examples.

But how much would it hurt to make this a time for renovations in the name of safety?

It took a little more than two years and $45 million to construct the new Life Sciences Building. At $7,000 per elevator, it will cost $2.4 million to add emergency phones to the university's 345 elevators.

At the proposed rate, it will take longer to complete elevator renovations than it did to build the Life Sciences Building.

Perhaps it's time to set priorities, Penn State.