Salem College

This college will destroy your GPA and the degrees are so useless where any public school has tons of degrees that can actually get you a good job or at least viable connections - trust me when I say there are many sadistic professors on the payroll who destroy your grades and they don't help you with anything involving getting a job.

Leave as soon as possible and you will have less student loans, better grades, and a better social life.

There are no nice people - only jealous and catty girls who try to destroy each other socially and academically through misleading teachers and throwing racial slurs around.

The student body is disgustingly jealous of each other and so much tension, drama, and hatred - its better to have men around so that there are less problems.

The anger that the girls feel toward each other is insane - with extreme levels of jealousy directed towards girls with better grades, a better academic/social reputation, or girls with a scholarship bigger than the others.

This school is hell on earth - the most miserable people possible go here who do nothing but spread drama and hate about each other every single day even behind the backs of their best friends.

Did you hear about the racism that goes on here in the newspapers?
It's real...the administration and students had an all out war this year on social media and in real life that ended with threats of expulsion for peacefully protesting groups.

Beware of racist old professors especially in the philosophy department - Dr. Rushing makes racist slurs a lot and openly favors students who join in on her racist tirades.

Avoid her unless you want an easy class and don't care if you get a grade lower than you deserve because she doesn't like people who are intelligent.

She goes on crazy tangents and the number of racist slurs she throws is unparalleled at the school - I know from first-hand accounts she started the crazy racist administration hurting nice students feelings until they were crying for weeks.

It's an awful school - I am not bitter I did fine but a lot of my friends cried over how it ruined their gpa and now they can never get a job.

I personally left my field because I was so fed up with the burned out feelings of working my butt off to maintain a gpa considered mediocre at other schools because this school is so notoriously difficult.

Nothing I say is a lie - investigate and others will agree.
The orientation leaders lie their faces off and I watched them laugh about fooling poor prospective students.

The food is often uncooked at the cafeteria and the faculty and staff are rude and openly mock students to their faces.

Overall, worst four years of my life and I haven't even shared half of the problems with this hellhole yet.

Beware, even if you get a massive scholarship that they gave it to you so you would overlook the bad food, bad dorms, mean students, no boys, no fun, horrible professors, and more.

Alumnus Male -- Class 2000

Do you want the truth? Well you've come to the right place.
We're going to focus on a few specific aspects about Salem College in this review
1. Education
2. College Life
3. Salem's Economy
4. Administration
5. Campus Services
1. As for the educational aspect Salem College focuses primarily on women's studies and is the oldest continually running women's college in the United States. It's an incredibly unique experience and has an interesting history. It doesn't have ?world renown? professors or educational specialties beyond it being uniquely focused primarily on women's studies but most of the majors the college offers are competently taught.

2. College life on campus is complicated. There are no males allowed to live on campus dormitories. This is strictly a women's college in that respect, though men are allowed to attend college here provided certain requirements are met. There is a very strong progressive, or politically left movement on this campus. Safe spaces, minority groups, and other such things are commonplace. For example, when President Trump was elected students were often seen crying and highly distraught. Therapy dogs were brought in due to this and classes were even cancelled. This is an incredibly weak culture and oftentimes more conservative students have been singled out by the far larger majority of "liberal" students. Conservatives on campus are not allowed to have a voice without getting called baseless names such as racist, Islamophobe, hater, bigot, etc. If you are, or hold, any conservative values this college is almost certainly not for you. Hate speech claims are frequent and prevalent, claims of students being discriminated against due to race by faculty and staff are also prevalent. False claims have been made about racism within the school hierarchy. Protests are frequent by the student body. The student body also is very demanding of the school administration and demands many unrealistic and unreasonable things from it. This is why you may see one star ratings from the recent posts from students here in google reviews. The student body seems to believe that whoever is part of the most minority groups, has the most respectability and popularity on campus. It's a victim hood mentality here on campus. If you're not a member of a minority, this is not the college for you as you will be ostracized.

3. Salem College is dependent upon donations for their growth. It is my opinion, and the opinion of certain faculty and staff members that the college has experienced fewer donations than normal and as such many cost saving measures have been implemented recently. The college is quite expensive to attend, about the same cost as the nearby High Point University. Salem College's age is an important factor in its uniqueness and attraction for many students. It's age however is also a drawback for these same students who often complain of dormitory issues and facility failures. These buildings are extremely old for the most part, even with renovations there are going to be many issues. If you are not willing to accept this than do not attend school here as the most recent and modern dormitory is only for upper classman.

4. The administration of Salem College is varying in their degrees of effectiveness. For example, the Vice President of the college, Anna Gallimore, has cut many corners in order to save money for the college at the expense of the students. We'll get into this in the school services section. There are also rumors that there is even a senior administrator who has been taking kickbacks from contractor companies. The administration has also failed to rehire for numerous positions on campus after employees resigned causing delays and increased work loads.

5. School Services
Contractors: Ask yourself an important question. Do you want a schools employees to work directly for that school or do you want the school to contract its services to the lowest bidder? I can assure you that when a school contracts it's services to a contracting company the quality of the service goes down.

Salem College is currently in the process of contracting as much of its staff as possible to the lowest bidder.

The food services were the first to be contracted out. They were contracted to a large company, Aramark Services. I highly recommend you talk to the student body about the quality of the food preparation at Salem College. You will quickly find it is extremely low, excluding specific holidays and days where parents visit.

The second service to be contracted was the Public Safety Department. The number of security officers were cut significantly, their pay was lessened, their benefits slowly removed and revoked and they were completely disarmed. That's right, the people in charge of your children have no capability to physically protect them. They are armed with a radio and a small flashlight. Nothing else. When the college ran security the guards had night sticks, hand cuffs and mace. On top of that they are paid quite poorly. From what I understand an average officer is paid approx. $11 an hour with no benefits. So the people in charge of protecting your kids are only paid $21,000 per year. What happens when your children are in danger and the only people who can help are paid very little and have no weapons? I'll leave you to think about that. Now the administration will say that the Winston-Salem Police Department patrols the area frequently. That is disingenuous. If there is a serious incident, let's say an active shooter, the police are anywhere between 2 and 7 minutes away from arriving on campus. Then the police must attempt to locate the shooter and neutralize them. However, the police do not know the campus very well because they do not directly patrol it. Only campus security knows the area and has the expectation to help the police. If you are paid $11 an hour and have no weapon to protect yourself, no body armor to protect against bullets, will you wait around for the police and then lead them to an active shooter? Maybe some would, but there's certainly no incentive for them to do so. They are simply unarmed security guards. Their uniforms and titles as Public Safety Officers are deceiving. This is not to mention the high turnover rate. It seems like I see a new face every month, and I don't mean they're adding employees. In fact, they are running on a skeletal crew. When the Public Safety Department was directly run by Salem College (not by a contracting company) they had ample personnel for proper coverage of the college. Now I can count the number of security guards on two hands. Ever since the college handed the security department over to contractor companies they have switched companies three times. If you send your children to attend this college they will not be adequately protected to the level I would desire my own children be protected. If you contact the school about these issues, they will downplay them. They will say they will work on addressing them but they have failed to do so in the past. Eventually those asking questions stop and everything returns to normal and no lasting changes are made. These security flaws need to be addressed and need to be addressed sooner rather than later. The safety of our kids are the most important thing.

Housekeeping, Maintenance, and Grounds Department: These have recently become contracted. The members of these departments who stayed will remain Salem College employees until they resign. Their positions will supposedly be replaced by lower paid contractors after their resignations. Already we can see a lowering of the quality of the grounds, and especially in the time it takes for any maintenance requests to get fulfilled.

The staff at Salem College were what made it special. There was financial incentive and other benefits such as the ability to send your children to the college for free, fully paid medical benefits, and other things. Sadly these have all been revoked over the past few years. The old staff who worked at Salem College for their entire professional careers are now leaving and with them go that special touch which makes a college special. The staff who replace them are low paid contractors who are just doing a job, and doing it poorly at that. The only highly paid employees (or adequately paid employees for that matter) are the staff department heads. Many of the employees in the Residential Life department have left in this past year alone, the head of the Physical Plant and most of it's long term staff have abandoned ship as well. It really seems like rats jumping off a sinking ship is a good analogy for the staff and faculty migrating away from Salem as fast as they can find new economic opportunities. Salem College has gone downhill significantly in recent years and is poised to continue to do so. It saddens my heart as I've seen this campus culture degenerate and the schools prosperity decline since I attended in my youth. I hope we can reverse it before I retire but I doubt this will be the case. It can be done, High Point University (our largest local private college competitor) was in a very similar position 10 years ago before their current President took over. They've completely turned themselves around and I know we can do it too, but not if we don't acknowledge the issues.Please feel free to contact me at to discuss these issues. I want this school to change for the better and I've loved Salem and will continue to do so.

Alumnus Male -- Class 2000

What they say about an all girls school is true. The DRAMA is horrible. Residential life is lazy and biased and unprepared for their job, they are never there when you need them. Food for non, typical meat eaters is bad( there was food poisoning going on a few years ago. No air-conditioning, so be prepared to sweat and no night life. In short don't go.

1st Year Female -- Class 1920

Education Quality: B+, Social Life: F