Virginia Commonwealth University

Date: May 28 2018
Major: Computer Science (This Major's Salary over time)
Are you a pothead, slacker, or just a garden variety moron? If yes, then VCU is the place for you. I gave the school mostly Cs and Ds on the survey because this is of course a school for C and D students. On campus you can spot the rare halfway intelligent and serious attendees by the lost and broken look in their eyes, no doubt a result of having realized that they have forever stained their name and any claim to mental acuity by associating with this dumpster of an institution. If you miraculously graduate from this toilet (VCU has low freshman retention rates and even lower graduation rates), employers will look at your resume with a mixture of pity and disgust before tossing it in the garbage where it rightly belongs.

To any young people considering VCU, I implore you—look elsewhere. Go to community college, where the standards will be higher, the tuition cheaper, the administration more helpful, and you'll have an easier time of transferring to one of Virginia's good universities like UVA or W&M. I myself checked out of this sewer for a proper school and am glad to say I never look back, though the shame of having spent even one nanosecond on campus will remain with me forever (I usually tell people I came from community college since that's actually less embarrassing).

Some posters here will say,

Yes, the general academics are atrocious, but many individual programs are good.

This is, of course, another comforting lie which VCU students repeat to themselves in order to make it through another depressing day in scenic Richmond, Virginia. At best, some programs are MEDIOCRE rather than downright garbage, and VCU students are wont to confuse mediocrity with success. Even the art department, supposedly among the top-ranked in the country, is considered merely average by professional artists, as it is EXCLUSIVELY the graduate program of 200 students that's actually ranked highly—not the undergraduate program of about 3000 students, contrary to VCU promotional materials.

Another favorite often pointed to is the engineering program, impressively ranked 125th in the nation by the USNWR, which I suppose is better than VCU's overall ranking of ONE-HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-ONE.

In short, this is a for-profit university that preys on the lazy and the naive, not unlike Strayer or DeVry. Some immigrants (usually Asian) who don't know better or who can pull off sizable scholarships send their kids here, and they're occasionally able to make something of their time at the worst public state school in Virginia. An easy GPA in STEM can take you someplace better. But the overwhelming majority of kids at VCU are immature potheads who sat in the back of the class shooting spitballs, middle class minorities too dumb even for affirmative action, pretentious art geeks who imagine themselves as the next Bob Dylan or Stanley Kubrick, and general failures from all walks of life. Many will drop out once the professors stop awarding them Cs just for showing up, but many more will graduate and tarnish your reputation by association.

So please, avoid this university, unless you want to rub shoulders with future Walmart clerks and Richmond's burgeoning criminal population, or perhaps join them.