Temple University

Date: Mar 04 2022
Major: History/Histories (art history/etc.) (This Major's Salary over time)
Horrible dorms- room was consistently 87-89F maintenance refused to fix it 5 times. Mice swarm in back of J&H, no one cared and reported to health dept no change ever. Insane billing and fine practices, even worse than the average. I switched majors 3 times and got decent snapshots of 3 programs and 2 campuses. Main campus is a brutalist pit designed to get blood from stones. Tell them you can?t eat anything to get out of the mandatory meal plan. Tell them you will be living with a relative and skip the mandatory year in dorms. Do not trust the bursar- they will rob your financial aid and merit ASAP. All they want from you is cash and at every step all systems and administrators are there to minimize and gaslight you and your problems. The head of the honors program threatened to ?destroy my academic career? and blew up at me for asking for their help twice in 6 months. This school has some incredible professors (1/10) but the casual cruelty of their bosses and administrators makes getting an education here a brutal lesson in the dispassionate barbarity of big institutions. Need a health check or therapy? Fill out 10 forms for 15 minutes to have someone tell you to come back next time. Don?t try to work and take fewer classes than you think you can handle. Temple constantly re-rigs the credit system so virtually all students will take 6 years to graduate without tons of crunch time. They want you to take a decade to matriculate: you will meet ?super-seniors? who have been at temple for a decade or more taking a few credits a semester. My real advice if you ended up here? Transfer. For the love of god transfer out. The whole place is cursed. The land the school is built on was stolen using eminent domain and the neighborhoods still hate everyone at temple. Cecil B Moore was once the jazz capital of the US. Now it?s a wasteland of hideous slabs and 10? fencing. Ambler campus is nicer, but being destroyed from within- it?s not profitable enough so they?ve been shutting down more and more buildings and trying to put all the classes in one spot. The horticulture program is dying. Botany is a joke with ancient equipment and labs.

Campus and near will never be safe because the school is an open wound to north philly- which has plenty of those to begin with. You will get zero post graduation support or help with finding work. This schools graduation rate is horrible and they will not help. In fact they will hit you up for money within a year of graduating. They will also delete your student email ASAP, and never tell you they slapped some fines on your acct just as you were leaving. With interest and fees these tiny fines will be thousands of dollars if you need your transcript or a copy of your diploma. Good luck and get out ASAP. Also please remember a lot of the programs are fake. E.g. there is no Portuguese faculty, but they list it in all the literature. You can do self study under the Spanish department, but that?s it. There?s dozens of programs like this that only exist on paper to entrap you.

Overall I wish I had gone to a better school- temple pulled my year?s merit aid a month before 1st semester for 5 years? to grow the endowment. I was early admissions and was totally blind sided. It still seemed cheaper than NYU, brown etc- boy was I wrong. The sticker price is a complete lie, I ended up paying what they still quote as total cost every semester. I had to beg my family every month and had to deal with holds messing up my schedule. I was also working multiple part time jobs on and off and was always out of food. These may sound like individual problems- but the bursar and other services (sauna-like dorms, inedible food) we?re dramatically compounded by how bad temple?s services are. And there?s really no one to go to for help or assistance. Every office is designed to deflect people away and do as little work as possible. I met plenty of sympathetic professors who tried to give me advice, but ultimately Temple is a crushing machine that crushes students and drains their cash and future earnings but doesn?t put them back together again. Stay away.