Colby College

Date: Jul 10 2008
Major: Economics (This Major's Salary over time)
I think Colby is an all round terrible place to come if you are not a rich preppy kid 20 mins outside of Boston. The social life at Colby is pretty bad. You are extremely isolated from the rest of the world and if you are not from a rich snobbish background you will not enjoy it. Most students live in their little world with a social ladder that people try to climb up year by year. If you are not blonde and perky or a sweet dude you will be ignored or looked down upon. The social life consists solely of heavy binge drinking in your rooms and pretending to be cool because you drank a tone last night. It's an absolutely disgusting culture. The peer pressure is pretty high as well so you will feel somewhat of an outcast if you don't drink and hard to take part in the social life.

In terms of academics the so called "superior" academics are more of the students own work. The professors esp in the supposedly "excellent" departments such as econ, chem, govt are full of arrogant men and women most of whom cannot teach to save their lives. Instead they make the exams extremely hard so that many students will drop the class and the only ones who remain will have worked so hard on their own merit and learned the material and of course the prof will take credit for it. Or they usually have a family member helping them through the process. Most students feel horribly demoralized at the end of their majors (and this is also a feeling of top scoring students who have been hired by major firms) and never want to see another book again or their profs again. I ask you is this the correct way to educate? You don't really come to Colby to learn anything, but to try to figure out how to not get screwed by the profs. Also the profs use their ability to write references for future employment or grad school as leverage against you, but I am glad that when I was leaving more employers were not caring about a person's grades or references from profs that they were no longer able to use this leverage.

I had really high hopes for Colby and unfortunately I was horribly disappointed. The best prof I took a class with was not tenured due to the usual Colby admin politics and actually one of the best instructors was someone who did not have a PHD. So this tells you a lot about this school. I would not recommend coming to Colby honestly.