Clarkson University

Date: Dec 04 2009
Major: Engineering Department (This Major's Salary over time)
As easily taken from the other comments, Clarkson has been steadily declining in quality for quite some time. If you look through the dates of the comments there is an easily distinguishable trend.

You go to college to get a job, an education is an added bonus if you manage to get one. The problem is Clarkson's reputation seems to be going downhill with employers. Even the big corporation employers that this school admires seem to be shying away.

As far as cost goes, Clarkson has quite the scheme going. The tuition is actually pretty reasonable when you look at it on a fact sheet. What they don't tell you is what everything else costs. When you add in dorm room (generally forced, unless you are in a Frat, or as a Senior you can "apply" to be allowed to live off campus), and add in meal plan (again, generally not optional), your total tuition price is the same as RPI's. The main problem being that Clarkson is not anywhere near the same league RPI is, except for the hole they leave in your pocket.

What that room and board gets you is, depending on luck during the "housing lottery", half of a small concrete box for a bit over 1k dollars a month.

At the start of the Fall 09 semester Clarkson started with their new web proxy system, to save on bandwidth. As of the end of the semester, with dozens of emails from dozens of people to the tech department, the internet still barely works. The proxy system randomly disconnects from the internet a few times an hour, making playing multiplayer games a nightmare. When the internet does work, the bandwidth is around DSL levels, hardly what a 50k dollar a year college should be providing.

Clarkson has decided that it wants to become a "walking campus" recently. They plan on doing it by removing parking lots on a campus that is already starved for parking. Their first plan is to remove one of the lots used entirely by daily commuters, that is always completely full. They have blocked off one of the main roads through campus for absolutely no reason. In order to drive from one section of the campus (quad/pit) to the rest of the campus, you need to leave the campus…

The food on campus isn't all that bad, there are quite a few different places to eat on campus. The problem is mainly price. The forced meal plan is roughly twice what it would cost to eat three meals a day every day of the semester.

The teaching faculty is generally subpar. Freshman year is flooded with horrible teachers, majority of whom can't speak english. It seems one of Clarkson's goals freshman year is to crush student's GPA to force them to stay. (which is the only reason I am still here).

After Freshman year the teachers generally get better, simply because you can pick and choose. Many of the required classes are only taught by one teacher though, and generally a garbage teacher at that. Those who can not do, teach.

In summation, Clarkson is a once great school that badly needs new management to turn things around. Clarkson's costs are significantly over what you would pay at a better college. Until Clarkson makes some significant changes, your money would be spent better elsewhere.