Another complaint is that Swarthmore fails to prepare you for a career.  Well, so do most elite colleges and universities.  That's why there are trade schools for people who just want to get a job, and grad schools for graduates.  The fact of the matter is that telling your school's name to an employer is a much smaller factor than finding a networking contact with an employer.  If anything, the situation at Swat is that it can be very difficult to land an awesome first job right out of college not necessarily because of the lack of skills training, but because Swat doesn't have a very good alumni network.  But what does that mean?  Well, it turns out that when you go searching for alumni contacts, they're usually working in bizarre fields that don't directly pertain to you, rather than corporate jobs with big businesses.  This is because most Swatties have big ideas about what they want to do in the world, be it start an NGO in Africa or create a website to help innercity students get an edge up, and after a few years of getting themselves some money and some contacts, they actually end up doing exactly what they wanted to do.  Now, as a senior looking for a contact for a first job, that kinda sucks unless you're already really passionate about women's rights in Ghana, but it also offers that hope that you might one day realize your own dream too.  And from what I've heard from recent graduates, once Swatties get their foot in the door of whatever career they're interested in, they rise very quickly through the ranks because Swat has taught them to do superb work that easily overshadows the stuff coming out of other recent grads.