Kean University

Date: Apr 14 2006
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
I wouldn't have gone to Kean if my family's financial situation hadn't forced me to attend a nearby inexpensive school. Kean is probably the least reputable of New Jersey's state schools, and the administration that has been in place for the past few years ignore the school's dire academic situation, focusing attention instead on meaningless trifles such as campus aesthetics (temporary flowers and trees, plastic picket fences) and public relations (billboards on buses, badly made commercials, propaganda music videos). As Kean is also planning to annex Ocean County College, students can expect the death of any potential academic improvements, skyrocketing tuition, and the school's (non-existant) reputation falling further to the dregs.

While I have had rather good experiences with the full-time faculty members of my department, they are few and far between. In the English department alone, there are less than 20 full-time professors and around 100 adjunct 'faculty'. As the Kean administration focuses on physical rather than academic expansion, available resources stretch thinner and thinner. Full-time faculty becomes less available while uncaring, unattentive, and academically inept adjuncts teach upper-level and graduate courses. Students at Kean are paying nearly eight grand each year and are taught by high school teachers, lawyers, accountants, and part-time professors teaching at anywhere from five to ten schools rather than by actual scholars.

At Kean we are not students, we are customers purchasing $32,000 pieces of paper. Kean is not a university, it is a papermill.

I would encourage anyone who reads this not to go to Kean. You can have a good experience here—I have established good relationships with a large portion of faculty in the English department, have gotten involved in university politics and extracurriculars, have taken challenging classes taught by actual academics, and as a result have gotten into a good graduate school that I will attend in the fall. If you can wade through the administrative filth and the desolate situation of the school, you should be OK.

I wouldn't want to go through this experience again.