Ah yes, college parking... reminds me of the bad old days.
They oversold the parking permits i.e. if there were 1000 parking spaces they'd sell 1200 permits. So you'd buy the stupid permit and still oftentimes have no place to park.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me... I only bought the permit once and after that took to parking on the streets. Yeah, then they declared no street parking for like a two mile radius of campus so I got lots of "portaging" in, then got to where I didn't even drive, I bicycled the 8 miles. Well my legs were in great shape and I saved a lot of $ on gas!