Grinnell College

Date: Mar 06 2012
Major: Psychology (This Major's Salary over time)
Seriously, don't go here if you want to form your own worldview and be your own person—which is what college SHOULD be about. At Grinnell College, if you're anything less than ultraliberal and ultratolerant, you'll be ostracized and often labeled as a racist/sexist/homophobe. Classes, for the most part, revolve around political correctness and leftist propaganda that the school likes to call "academia." And I say all this as a progressive liberal.

A lot of my fellow students were (I left the school after a couple of years) sociology and gender/women's studies majors, which, well, is pretty telling in and of itself. After all, the integrity of such courses mostly hinges upon intense political correctness and leftist thought. The political correctness and extreme intolerance of differing viewpoints extends outside of the classroom as well. If you are a moderate—or even, like I was, simply soft-spoken about your political views and the lifestyle that accompanies such views—you'll be a pariah here. Just so you know, the most popular event on campus here is Mary B. James, a cross-dressing ball where male students paint their nails and dress in women's clothing and vice versa. Yep. If you want to live a straight, relatively normal, yet accepting and welcoming lifestyle, it can be frustrating being at Grinnell.

As far as the non-political attitudes and personalities of the students, many of the students could be considered "bookish," "introverted," and "socially awkward." These aren't necessarily bad things ordinarily, but the fact that nearly the entire student body is this way makes for quite a stodgy and standoffish atmosphere. Especially when you're in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa, and the students at the college are your world. Oh yeah, and drinking and drug use is rampant due to the isolation and the students' tendency to imbibe in illicit substances to cope with social awkwardness. I drink myself and have no problem with it; however, this drinking is often not of the "fun" or "moderate" variety. It is of the "Well damn, I'm stuck in Iowa" and "Let's blackout because there's nothing to do" variety. Rarely is drinking at Grinnell truly about letting loose and having fun—As alluded to earlier, many of the people at the school were beat up or lived under a rock in high school, so the kids just go dangerously out of control in college to compensate for it. I checked into it, and as it turns out, on a per-capita basis, Grinnell had more alcohol and drug hospitalizations than Penn State, often ranked as the #1 party school.

The professors, which theoretically would have been the only reason for me not dropping out of this place, are also quite overrated. I had some who were fantastic (Professors Hamlin and Lussier in the Poli Sci department were quite excellent)—and some who couldn't teach or organize the class material in a meaningful manner to save their lives. All professors are accessible; however, accessibility doesn't mean a thing if the professors' explanations are not useful to begin with. The rigor is overrated as well. While it is true that you will write long papers here, any program in the liberal arts—even at large state universities—will make you do that. It is true that the comments on your papers are often more useful than the comments you would receive from TAs, this is not always the case (see: professors overrated bit).

To sum it all up, the Grinnell experience was a miserable waste of time and money that featured knowledge that could have easily been learned elsewhere. Run to somewhere else—hell, anywhere else—for college as if your life depended on it, because it probably does.