Cleveland State University

Date: Aug 26 2010
Major: Computer Science (This Major's Salary over time)
Cleveland State University (CSU) is a school which is in a constant state of transition. It was in a transition period when I entered; it was in a transition period at the time I graduated; and four years after graduation it is in yet another transition period. I am not sure if it has transitioned into a better period for the school.

When I entered graduate school there, the school was a joke. It allowed anyone to enter undergraduate no matter what their background educationally. Graduate school was only a little harder than that to be admitted. I had earned a 3.3 and a 3.2 gpa at the previous institutions I attended. I had to take the GRE and just get any score on it to be admitted to CSU's graduate program.

I had earned two Bachelor's degrees, one in Political Science and one in Computer Science. I had four years of work experience as a programmer. Even still, I was required to take three preparatory courses to earn my Master's degree. The person in charge of evaluating this changed their mind after I had been admitted to the program and took two semesters of classes. All the preparatory classes were waived when I was admitted. CSU requires your program be audited one semester prior to graduation. During this audit, the person evaluating my program was the person who had previously waived the preparatory classes. That person decided I needed to take the preparatory classes before I would be allowed to take the last required class in my degree… which added an extra semester to my program.

The faculty at CSU is a joke. There were only three professors that knew their stuff. The rest would assign reading from text books, assign reading of their notes and powerpoint presentations, and then would read those same powerpoint slides during the class. I recall one instance when I corrected the professor because her notes were obsolete (extremely dated) and taught the professor the newer and correct way to program. The faculty was never available for discussion outside of class. Everything was done by e-mail, never face to face.

The administration does not care about the students. All they seem to care about is getting grants and funding. This money does not go into improving programs and hiring better faculty. It goes into buying surrounding parcels of land and building new structures. They demolished the student center, which was barely thirty years old, to create something with more usable space. I have been in the new student center which is to open in a matter of weeks. It has a huge open atrium which is a complete waste of space. Parking is a nightmare. They keep jacking up the prices for parking permits, all the while they close down the parking lots closest to the buildings. They keep building garage structures on the outer perimeter of campus.

The faculty and staff are unfriendly and disgruntled. I have heard from many that their pay was frozen for the last two years. They fired a ton of the visiting professors which brought innovation and new knowledge/new blood to the institution. Yet, they hired a new president for an extra one-hundred thousand dollars (making him one of the top four university presidents in the state, even though the school is rated so very low). I read in the alumni newsletter or the school paper that this very same president went back and asked for a big bonus as well. In this economy, that is just horrible and wrong.

Being an urban university, safety and security is a major concern for students. The university is within twenty blocks of downtown Cleveland's center. There is a Greyhound station across from campus and a homeless shelter two or three block from campus. There is a security force and police department on campus, which I see walking or driving around all the time (kudos to that). I cannot say the same for the fire and security. There seemed to be false alarms going off half the time and doors were rarely secured at night.

I could not recommend CSU to anybody. The only reason I went there was due to the fact that my wife was employed there during my education, which gave us free tuition.