The Franciscan University of Steubenville

Date: May 28 2005
Major: Psychology (This Major's Salary over time)
Franciscan is a beautiful university, set atop a hill in Steubenville, Ohio. It is in a pretty peaceful area of a somewhat decrepit old steel mill town. You should probably own a car if you were to live on campus, because there isn't much to do in the town. I was a commuter, and not Catholic. Franciscan was offering a special on tuition to attract people in the Steubenville area, so I took advantage. Big mistake.

My single biggest problem with Franciscan is that NONE, and I repeat NONE of my professors taught the cirruculum that one would expect from a psychology program. I am an older undergraduate student (24 years old) and was taking 18 credits, or six classes. Out of all six, I would say that I learned something in one class, which was a class in social work. Each and every single professor felt the need to shove the Catholic faith down each student's throat, and I was absolutely appalled that none of the students seemed to think that it was abnormal.

For example, in my Personality Theories class, I expected to be learning, well, personality theories. That is, various famous historical figures in psychology and how they have shaped psychology today. Not so. I had a teacher that was instead comparing abortion to the Holocaust, telling us biblical stories (which would be fine had they been related to personality theories), among other nonrelated subjects. Also I found it odd that a few of my professors wanted to save students money on books (which is kind), but in order to do that, they comprised their own books by photocopying pages of other people's books and selling them for $5 or so in the bookstore. I found this blatant act of copyright violation shocking in a school with university status. I also have no idea how they managed to get accreditation if the cirruculum isn't taught.

I understand that Franciscan is a Catholic university, and I expected a prayer before each class and things like that, but if you want to actually learn something I would say perhaps to look elsewhere.