College of the Atlantic

Date: May 02 2014
Major: Other (This Major's Salary over time)
COA is an alternative college currently in flux. Formerly vegetarian and all about hairy-legged hippie freedom, it's now more for marine-bio loving artists and hikers who want to butcher their own meat.

Visit, and if you're at all skeptical like I was, trust your instinct and don't go. If you love it to death, think it's totally your thing, and are wholly enthused, you will probably get exactly the education you want from it. It's all about what you put in. COA isn't for people who just want to do homework, classwork, and get a degree. It's at its best when you've got projects and subjects that you want to tie together in unconventional ways.

But there's a caveat.

If you get sexually assaulted on campus, hope that your rapist doesn't have a lot of money. What I've heard is that, despite an internal investigation finding an affluent senior student guilty of raping a freshman, his "expulsion" consisted of giving him a degree and whisking him out the door. I would qualify this as much more than a rumor, given how many people have told me this, some of whom I believe were on the judiciary committee, one of whom knows the victim well, and all of whom know the perpetrator (his part of this came as no real surprise).

It's just especially sad since it feels like such a safe school. To taint your reputation by letting rich parents buy their son's degree despite him being convicted of assault is just unacceptable. I don't care how strapped for cash you are; that's not a compromise you get to make without being held accountable. I also wish that the otherwise activism-trigger-happy student body had protested this AT ALL, especially considering how up in arms they were over a stupid juice machine. It really revealed a lot about the whole COA environment for me.