New College of the University of South Florida

Date: Feb 05 2011
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
As an NC alum, I can tell you I learned more from my fellow students than from the professors. While many of the professors were clearly brilliant, very few of them were interested or capable of holding down tenure track jobs at conventional institutions. This was good for me, as professors were more interested in teaching than publishing (the exact opposite of mainstream academia). Job placement and related services were nonexistent. You were basically on your own from the moment they handed you your diploma, and unless you wanted to go into academia, the prospects were grim (no one outside academic circles seems to know much about NC).

The general consensus among NC folk in the 90's was that NC was a relatively safe place for intelligent neurotic types to play until they could no longer avoid interaction with the real world. NC did have a frightening propensity for burn-out; a lot of people I entered with ended up hanging around Sarasota without graduating, working at health food stores (if they could even swing that). NC has a strong gravitational pull that many people find hard to escape; some people get caught up in the NC demimonde and never leave.

Other than that, NC is really for anyone. Lots of cliques, it's true, but no more than any comparable school, and if you wanted to be a complete freak and do your own thing, nobody bothered you. If you have problems and you need some place to sort your sh*t out over four years and you don't want to fork out for expensive trustafarian schools in the northeast, you could do far worse than NC. Also, if you're bisexual and passably good looking, you will have a LOT of sex.