Hampshire College

Date: Apr 27 2010
Major: Political Science (This Major's Salary over time)
Hampshire College is a joke. In theory the school is great, but in practice, it has been horribly implemented.

There are very few academic and social resources. Of the ones that do exist, no one even knows about them because they hardly do anything, they don't publicize anything, and they are extremely disorganized. Career Options Resource Center is the worst resource on campus. It's not too early to start thinking about getting a job, as your freshman and sophomore year of college is really the time to start. Most colleges help you design your resum? and give you a list of jobs in the area or alumni looking for interns. At this place, they give you the link to a website that's the career equivalent of craigslist. Anyone can access it and the opportunities are located in a city half an hour away with no public transportation.

The facilities are run-down and broken. This is not an elitist concern - it's a concern for people who can't pay for facilities that actually work. For example, I don't mind that the dorm rooms are small and somewhat moldy. But I do mind that the campus printers never work and the staff in charge of fixing them always smiles and claims that they'll take care of it, but the problems never change. I don't own a printer, so I always have to use my friends' at 3am.

The classes are bad. 90% of the classes have an explicit agenda. If you don't agree with the professor that anarcho-communist societies are the only way to reduce poverty in the world or that women who aren't third-wave radical feminists are being oppressed by a societal illusion, then she'll treat you like the dreaded conservative kid and be a jerk to you and write immature, irrelevant, negative comments on your evaluation.

Completely homogeneous campus. Don't believe any claim that this place is diverse. It is the most homogeneous place I have ever been in my life. The huge majority of white people is not the biggest problem here - almost every student that I've met is liberal, upper-middle class, between 18 and 26, from a suburb near a city, owns a Mac, is really into "social justice," was an awkward misfit in high school and either thinks they're really cool for taking psychedelics or is intensely, awkwardly sub-free.

DO NOT GO HERE - that is, if you actually have to think about getting a job someday, and not spend the rest of your life in grad school, with your parents paying for your social thought courses on post-modernism.