Swarthmore College

Date: Nov 28 2004
Major: Chemistry (This Major's Salary over time)

Swarthmore will distract you from your personal and professional goals and alienate you from your true self and substite false ideas and ideologies in their place. The professoriate is strongly politically and ideologically motivated toward the far left of the political spectrum and would agree that the function of education is to radically change the political, social, and economic structure of American society to suit their idea of what it should be. They have gradiose ideas on this issue. They are not stongly motivated to help students develop personally, intellectually, emotionally, and professionally, unfortunately. The Swarthmore experience is very similar to what it is like being in a religious cult. If you do not fit the mold and its goals, they will treat you with ruthless disrespect and wash you out.

Do not attend Swarthmore if you intend to major in Engineering, mathematics, or the hard sciences. The faculty's time is divided between obscure reseach and professional interests and teaching. They use consultants with questionable credentials and teaching ability. In a typical semester, many faculty are on leave making it difficult to take needed courses. Some courses meet only once a week and expect essentially self-taught, independent work on the part of the student to do the problem sets. Faculty sometimes insults individual students in class. Introductory courses do not have the advertised student faculty ratio and occur in large lecture halls similar to universities. Many courses lack the laboratory portion of the course that you would normally find. The faculty have a casual attitude about you and your education. They could care less. The faculty intends to educate only a small minority of students admitted to the collge. The faculty will say insulting things to you. " Did you not like the way things turned out". "That is a pretty stupid question. We'll let you ponder that Mr. Jones". The faculty will introduce ideas and material which undergraduates are normally not exposed to in a course without the necessary lecture or readings. The arrogance factor is high. The atmosphere is pretty impersonal and sometimes confrontational. The faculty will spend your tuition money writing and selling their textbooks, pursing their personal political agendas, and advancing their careers at your expense.

The people of Swarthmore, both students and faculty, are very unconventional. The student body and faculty contain a large number of the Jewish left academics and their sons and daughters. The students adopt the attitudes and culture and dress of hippies that you would find in the 1960's with long hair, birkenstocks, a disdain for dressing appropriately and bathing regularly. Drug use is a part of student life. The sons and daughter's of faculty are educated here for free and will be in classes inwhich their parents have direct responsiblity. The whole place is a insider's game.

Despite Swarthmore's defense of the liberal arts, the curriculm increasingly is focused on a combination of disconnected liberal arts courses and pre-professional studies. The faculty is worried about the statistics about how many of their students get into the appropriate graduate programs. This is all they care about. Diversity is a smoke screen for a lack of creativity and declining standards. They can not bring back the unique education which was Swarthmore's selling points in the 40's and 50's. It is too hard and they are too lazy.

Swarthmore has vast financial resources at its disposal in the endowment and its investment income. The faculty wants to enjoy that stream of income. Teaching the students comes way far down the line in terms of priority. They can continue to raise tuition and shorten the school year and take the quality out of the academic program because they know that people will pay for it. Student's parents are uninformed buyers and quality education is a hard to understand, abstract concept. It also requires work.

Swarthmore is pushing ethnic and international education and will use your money to fund these programs. They recently built a conference center off campus for this purpose. How that adds to your education is questionable?

Be suspicious of Swarthmore and their motives. Institutions like Swarthmore have been in decline for years. They have been trying to find a purpose for years. Their golden age has long passed and is not likely to come back. They see both itinerant faculty and students as people who neeed to work and study at this location and are sources of revenue.