Baldwin Wallace University

Date: Jan 03 2007
Major: Business - Management and Administration (This Major's Salary over time)
If you are considering attending B-W, I would highly recommend exploring the alternatives first. During my time here, I got the feeling that B-W was a school struggling to stay financially stable during a time when the local economy had bottomed out. Therefore, partly because small private liberal arts institutions are so numerous in this geographic region, it felt that B-W's strongest focus was on retaining students, not providing the most premium education. Perhaps the biggest example of this could be found in the drastically inflated grading curves found in most every class. At least in the business programs, it was not uncommon to be in a class that inflated final grades by as much as 15%. Maybe this would not be as big of a deal if students felt they were learning adequately, but more often than not, this wasn't the case, which is a perfect segway into the second problem: poor hiring policies for professors.

At least three times that I know of, professors were either hired or given tenure despite ATROCIOUS student eval ratings. This is not even including the current "lame duck" professors that already have tenure and are just coasting to retirement, despite the very same consistent poor ratings given by students. To compensate for this, many professors are either EXTREMELY easy or use the absurd aforementioned grading curve to try to win the favor of students, and unfortunately, since so many are only concerned with GPAs vice learning, it often works. 8/10 B-W business grads have GPAs well over 3.0…

For now, stay well-clear of the finance and be wary of the accounting programs as there are only a few strong instructors. As an aside, not a SINGLE course in the finance and accounting program here requires an HP financial calculator. Have fun trying to get a STRONG entry level finance position when you haven't even looked at a tool that most sophomore level finance majors from other schools are using, and by their senior years have mastered.

I have also heard that the math and computer science programs here are also a joke and many of the "advanced" courses are either dated or poorly taught. But then again, why are you considering coming to a small liberal arts school to study technology anyways?

If you are still considering attending here, I would only recommend coming for the programs that the school is considered strong in: Education, Business (Management, Business Administration, and Entrepreneurship), and the Conservatory.

In the future, I can only hope that my alma mater abandons its practices of attracting students by lowering thier admissions standards; retaining those students with lax grading policies; and saving money by hiring sub-standard and inadequate amounts of professors.