Pomona College

Date: Aug 26 2001
Major: Video/Media (This Major's Salary over time)
If U.S. News and World Report had a category remotely resembling "Most Useless College," I could well understand Pomona ranking at the top of it. I am consistently baffled by the high marks shown in these supposed surveys—having just spent several years at the school, I knew almost no students who were satisfied with their departments, their professors, or their administration. Pomona is a classic liberal arts school, which is to say that it takes in bright students of moderate motivation and turns out directionless, over-exposed, theorizing wastes of education. The only accurate description I've ever come across in a book called Pomona "the most politically correct school with the least idea of why." I went in liberal and came out libertarian. This college will ram p.c. idealism down your throat while paying possibly illegal immigrants to take out your trash and blow leaves off the quad. Most of this is due to the adminstration, which should go down in history as the leakiest ship ever run. They could very well be a product of their own institution, as their grasp of rhapsodizing double-talk is a hell of a lot stronger than their grasp of common sense (see the new Campus Center for an example). Worst of all, there are 1200 bright young people there whose time, energy, and brains are so misused that they get involved in political issues that they barely grasp. I am all for radicalism and protest when the passion involved is honest and heartfelt. But I have no respect for protestors whose first demand after taking over a building is that they not get in trouble. That is Pomona in a nutshell. All concept, no follow through, all anger, no logic.