Arcadia University

Date: Aug 28 2010
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
I applied to Arcadia mostly on a whim, and ended up there because I decided that I wanted to go to a smaller school that was close to, but not in a city, and the fact that Arcadia had neither football teams nor greek life was a huge plus.

I have two good things to say about Arcadia: First, Study abroad is almost expected, and I ended up spending a year and a half abroad, including going to London the first semester of my freshman year as part of the first FYSAE cohort.

Secondly, not every professor I had was terrible. I was a theatre minor and was able to fulfill a lot of my English electives with theatre credits, and I had a couple of really good theatre professors (Nora Berger-Green especially). In addition, I developed some positive relationships with professors in the Education department.

However, the English department was terrible. The school is so small that there isn't faculty to offer any more class options than just survey classes, the books chosen are almost exclusively from "the canon" and professors are so absorbed in their research areas that they are unwilling to help students explore more contemporary or unusual literature. The class that goes along with the internship, when I took it, seems based on an assumption that all English majors will go into business.

The school itself feels like a snooty boarding school. Almost all of the students come from within an hour of the campus, many of them went to private schools, and the student body is enormously clique-y and catty. Arcadia itself comes across as much more interested in promoting its image than it is about its students, and even FYSAE that year felt like a half-baked attempt to gain publicity (I have heard that the program has improved, though).

The good news is, depending on your major, you may only have to spend the fall semester of your senior year physically at Arcadia. If that's the case, it might be worth it to go. Spend 3.5 years abroad and grit your teeth for the semester you'll actually spend in Glenside… Or better yet, go somewhere else, Arcadia's not worth half of it's exorbitant tuition.