Southern Illinois University - Carbondale

Date: Nov 08 2011
Major: Economics (This Major's Salary over time)
Depending on your field of study, SIU is an easy school (math is very difficult no matter where you go). You can bet that most perspective employers are going to be savvy of this fact and will judge you accordingly. Holding all other factors constant, you might lose a job to a uofi graduate even if you if your gpa is a letter grade better. This itself isn't that bad, I personaly am not banking on superficial standards to determine my future. What's bad is it's source, students who have no place in academia. Low standards for course work exist because of poor students, and SIU has embarrassingly low standards like 2.0 hs gpa and 18 act. If you are a legitimately intelligent student you will feel out of place at SIU or at the least you will find it very difficult to find academic peers or truly interesting people. Those types are here but they are rare. Generally, they are smart people who hate school or intelligent people who received kick ass scholarships. For perspective college students, if you can't get into a prestigious school, go to juco. You'll save money, do some maturing along the way, and at the end you might have a shot at a better school. If you are already at SIU or this is seriously the best place you can get into, figure out what the good programs are and go for them if you think you will like them (business, aviation, and communication are well received, stay away from the college of liberal arts.) There is no such thing as "the right major" I could have majored in at least 5 other areas and have been happy with the decision. Or kick ass at SIU and go to a good grad school, I know of a guy from my department who went on to study stats at the Universtiy of Minnesota, to put that in perspective, this guy went from an econ program for college of business rejects to a top 15 program in math. As this example illustrates, success is all about distinguishing yourself with valuable skills, and at the end of the day grades/alma matter are just a superficial indicators that can only correlate to true value. If you can't go to a better school, SIU is a perfectly acceptable alternative.