Ithaca College

Date: Jun 22 2004
Major: Communications (This Major's Salary over time)
I actually never graduated FROM Ithaca College. This should not be surprising as the retention rate there hovers around 65%—which is laughable. I would say only 30% of the people I met in my freshman year there actually graduated from IC, and that' mostly because they were in specialized programs where, if they bailed now, it'd have been a HUGE waste of time and money because the credits weren't transferrable. Ithaca is a nightmare, and I'm not even talking about the community off-campus (which was actually one's only chance for escape and therefore chance for retention of sanity). Some people have been telling me since I left that the Park School of Communications was still getting its Proverbian S*** together when I was there, which is all fine and good, except that doesn't change the fact that I wasted $65,000 on a year of nothing but learning that a) professors can be some of the most useless, ridiculous, and pretentious people you will ever meet; b) apparently I do have less value as a human because my parents never made six-figure salaries (who knew?); and c) if you're in film school and discover you are using by default cameras that were literally used in WWII… and it's 1996… you might want to consider going elsewhere. The admissions office lied to me about their credentials, the classes were a joke (with the glaring exception of the fiction and poetry classes I had with Mark Blackwell, who was only there for the year I attended and moved on to UC-Davis) and I've never met a more pretentious group of art snobs in my entire life.

I transferred to Salisbury State University on the eastern shore of Maryland, paid $58,000 less per year, graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2000 with real experience in everything from film and radio production, print production, writing, editing, event planning, etc. etc. etc. and got an education that was immeasurably better than anything Ithaca could have ever offered me. There's a reason the mascot is the Bombers.