The State University of New York Purchase College

Date: Jun 22 2008
Major: Perfomance Arts (This Major's Salary over time)
SUNY Purchase is a supposedly great arts school, and for the minimal pricing (given that you're an in-state student like I was), that might be true. However, there are a plethora of things not only wrong with the school in general, but with the prestigious departments as well. One kind of bleeds in to the other.

First off, the program itself wasn't that bad. My professors gave work that none of the students understood because it was poorly explained. The staff seemed to not have tenure and to really dislike the students at times. There was no sense that these teachers were looking forward to fostering your career. They just seemed plain bored. My film professor was an exception. My main teacher for writing was so old he couldn't really remember what his own assignment was.

The atmosphere and social life are squarely the fault of the school, who encourage cliques and for you to know as FEW people as possible. They group you with two conservatories and expect you to settle for choosing between these scant 20-30 people as friends. In addition, you're put on a "conservatory floor" so you have no contact with the normal students. This is just plain snobbery.
Now if the kids in these conservatories were worth getting to know, I would have stayed; but they were snobbier than the department heads. The film majors were the nastiest bunch of people I have ever met: p.o.'d they didn't get into NYU, a real bunch of spiteful wannabe-hipsters. Unfortunately one of my roommates was in this group. He simply would not talk to me or be friendly to me because I was a

weird fucking writer

I think that social disasters like this should be expected. The school seems not to realize that you should be able to have a social scene to be passably happy, instead of slaving in some room writing a group project. Conservatory students get no time to do anything but work, work work for a nominal degree that doesn't even mean as much as it did considering the dip in respect for Purchase.
The snooty conservatories head told our orientation group that the low retention rate was due to students not being able to "handle it". Oh please! Would anyone want to graduate at Purchase? They simply do not provide an environment that any person, especially one with a mercurial creative outlook on life, would want to live around. It's a smelly, stifling, ugly, cliquish, mediocre school. Keep shopping if you're a "different" sort of kid.