Mount Holyoke College

Date: Jul 15 2004
Major: Political Science (This Major's Salary over time)
I transfered into Mount Holyoke from a community college. I have to say that some of the courses at the community college were more challenging than the courses at Mount Holyoke. I disliked the way the professors bent over backwards to give grades to students who didn't deserve it. All you had to do to pass a class was show up. What's up with that?, What happened to having to work for it? The amount of A's given out was way too high, there was not incentive to excel. It seems the professors feel they have to give the grades because of how much students pay to go there. Also, I disliked the way the all female environment lacked so much necessary to prepare real women of today for the work world. It doesn't help a girl to be in an environment where she is coddled and protected from reality. The result is someone is unprepared to face real adversity and react appropriately to the situations you are sometimes faced with in the business world. Also, the female only environment creates an atmoshere of cattiness and entitlement, a sincere competiveness becomes back stabbing behavior quickly. While the college markets itself as high on diversity, it interprets that to mean skin color. It is certainly not a diverse environment when it comes to class, or disability. The campus offices have the "old school" atmosphere, where people who have been there for years run them, and behave any way they like to the students, there is little respect, or customer service skills.

Also, and probably most bothersome is the "cultlike" attitude that the staff and some professors attempt to foist on students. If a student dares to suggest that she might transfer, she should be ready for down right antagonism from her counselor. She will be told things like "you will never receive this support elsewhere, you are making the biggest mistake of your life… etc", very hard pressure, hard sell behavior.

Overall I feel that Mount Holyoke is not worth the large amount of money it charges. The pleathora of "A's" make the grading system useless. The over abundence of liberal arts - soft - courses leave the student with little that entice a prospective employer to hire them,,,, In other words, they don't teach much that will help you get a job, be ready for grad school, you'll have little option. And when the hard courses ie example corporate finance, were offered, they were at times, and days, and semesters no student could fit into the schedule easily. I think that I would have been just as successful now, and probably happier in school, if I had spent a lot less money and gone to a different school.

The campus is beautiful