Grove City College

Date: Aug 22 2004
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
OK, look: Grove City is the perfect school for a certain kind of person. If you've lived a very sheltered life and you don't want your presuppositions to be challenged in any profound way, then by all means choose this school. But if you're the least bit "different"—say, maybe you're not 100% fundamentalist, or you embrace even the mildest tenets of feminism, or you're (gasp!) gay—then you're in for a very frustrating four years. (One of my friends got a lot of grief because she was a Catholic—no joke! —and I knew a few gay students who were depressed out of their minds.) Of course, the college is very up-front about its "agenda," so I doubt I'm sharing any new information. And to be perfectly honest, the school's academics are far better (and more rigorous) than most. (I've managed to gain admission to a #1-ranked PhD program, so I can't say my undergrad experience was a complete failure; at the same time, my application essays were humorous riffs on GCC's authoritarian atmosphere, so take it as you will.) My point, I guess, is that you can believe the school when it yammers on about its academic strengths, and you can believe the school when it says that it's a fundamentalist Christian institution, but don't believe the school when it says it's a bastion of "freedom." The atmosphere on campus, to the contrary, is strenuously controlled, behavior is strictly codified, and professors have been known to give lower grades for left-wing views.