My Concerns about Swarthmore

Colleges and Universities A-Z Swarthmore College
1

<p>Hey everyone,</p>

<p>When I was researching colleges, I came across the website <a href="http://www.studentsreview.com%5B/url%5D"&gt;www.studentsreview.com&lt;/a>. It's a website where graduates from colleges grade their school on a variety of factors, and where people can post what they love and hate about the school.</p>

<p>From the website alone I got the impression that Swarthmore might not give me a very great education, something I would expect from a top liberal arts college.</p>

<p>People on the website said that (and I quote my notes): people at Swarthmore are "narrow-minded," and there is very little room for difference of opinion. In fact, one person wrote that the Swarthmore experience is "very similar to what it is like being in a religious cult--if you don't fit in the mold, they'll treat you with ruthless disrespect." According to other posters, some courses expect essentially self-taught, independent work, and the college "doesn't prepare you for life, unless you consider being a full-time scholar." Ouch!</p>

<p>Of course, not everyone had such awful things to say. Many people said that Swarthmore values individualism and helps you develop yourself as an individual. Still, the bulk of my notes are negative.</p>

<p>There's a great contrast between what I read on the website and what I encountered on the school website and on Swarthmore's guidebook. The website showed genuinely nice people who were very accepting of differences and having lots of fun and learning a lot in an intellectual atmosphere.</p>

<p>I later found out that you don't even have to be a graduate of Swarthmore to post on the Swarthmore section of StudentsReview.com. I now no longer really trust the site, especially for the top colleges.</p>

<p>So, what do you guys think? I'd really appreciate it if some people try to clear things up for me, because right now I don't know what to think or whom to believe.</p>

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<p>You can find a lot of useful information on Swarthmore LiveJournal Community:
<a href="http://community.livejournal.com/swarthmore/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://community.livejournal.com/swarthmore/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>You can join the community and ask questions - current students and alums are usually very forthcoming with answers. But be sure to read the "memories" section first, so you don't ask about stuff that has been discussed to death already.</p>

<p><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/swarthmore/profile%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://community.livejournal.com/swarthmore/profile&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Memories:
<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=swarthmore%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=swarthmore&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>My experience of Swarthmore is a little distant as my daughter and son-in-law graduated in 2004, but I recall reading some of those comments on Students Review back in the day. My daughter is virtually a-political, which caused her to be out of the mainstream in some senses, but she never, ever complained of being ill at ease or slighted. She did note there seemed to be discrimination against some folks who had obviously Southern accents (she is from Tennessee but you would never suspect it in conversation with her.)</p>

<p>As far as getting a top-notch education, of course you can get that lots of different places if your goal is to get educated. She had a fabulous experience at Swarthmore academically, as did my SIL. How do you get prepared for life? Liberal Arts colleges teach you to think. Without question, Swarthmore does a great job of that.</p>

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<p>well in terms of a high-quality education, you can't find a place much better than swarthmore. the academics at swat are very intense, and some people are turned off by that. but i think it's pretty universally accepted that swarthmore offers one of the best educational opportunities in the country.</p>

<p>in terms of being narrow-minded, there ARE students at swat who can be rather narrow-minded. i just don't think it's a problem that a majority of the students have..you'll find narrow-minded students at any college.</p>

<p>things you should know: the campus as a whole is very liberal. you'll be studying a lot. most graduates of swat (i think the figure is around 90% within 5 years) go on to some sort of graduate school.</p>

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<p>nngmm: I took a brief look at those websites--they are helpful. Thanks. I think I can there are communities for different colleges--so that's a great resource. I'm going to take a deepr look at the websites soon.</p>

<p>momofthree: I'm glad that your daughter didn't have trouble with feeling a bit ill at ease--it's a very comforting thought.</p>

<p>ek1099: Yeah, 90% plan to go within 5 years. Swarthmore still sounds like an awesome place.</p>

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<p>Comments such as "Swarthmore doesn't prepare you for life" are absurd, just as such a comment would be about any college. What does that even mean? Whenever people make empty comments like that, or of the sort likening a college like Swarthmore to a religious cult or complaining about self-taught courses, it speaks more to how not everyone who went there should have gone there. If you don't feel prepared for life, that's your problem. If you can't find the benefit in a self-taught course, where your work is essentially reviewed by a professor, but where you're not guided through it, that is, once again, your problem. If you think people at Swarthmore are narrow-minded, then you've surely not been prepared for the real world at all, because the typical person on a college campus is far less narrow-minded than the typical person anywhere off of a college campus, and it is going to blow your mind when you learn what "narrow-minded" really means.</p>

<p>These all sound like meritless criticisms that speak more to individuals' inability to make use of the resources available at a place like Swarthmore than they do about the institution itself. There are surely a lot of negative points about a place like Swarthmore, but nothing mentioned in the original post is included in those negative points. And, if your worry is a good education, then you have to give some credence to the rate at which Swarthmore produces Ph.D.s, which is among the highest of any undergraduate institutions in the country. Surely the people who are on track to be researchers and professors must first acquire a good education.</p>

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<p>Some of the reviews on Student Review are so whacked that you have to believe they are fake. My guess is that a lot of prep school and high school kids sit around and submit reviews. I mean...seriously...what are the odds that five different students with 1370 SATs would rate Swarthmore's academics as a "D+"?</p>

<p>Of all the negatives you could point out about Swarthmore, the quality of the education would certainly not be one of them. There are lots of great schools, but I am quite confident that no school in the country offers better undergraduate education that Swarthmore. There is a synergy between the students and the faculty challenging each other that doesn't occur at every college. </p>

<p>You can get a glimpse of it reading, for example, Prof. Burke's blog when he talks about how great the students were in such and such a class last semester and then turn around and hear the way the students talk about the same class. Three years into the deal, my daughter still has at least two courses a semester that she lights up about whenever she talks about them. </p>

<p>The thing I notice when she shares an essay prompt or a take-home exam question is how much the professors require the students to actually think. The one that sticks in my mind was from her first-year American Politics course -- you know, where you study the relationships between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches. The take-home exam question was:</p>

<p>"What good is judicial review, really?"</p>

<p>You could take that in a million different directions, but you are forced to come up with your own thoughts. The reason I suggest that it is synergistic is that it is not possible to teach that way unless the students are engaged to start with (i.e. reading some of the material for class, etc.). Then, teaching that way tends to get students more engaged because it's not just learning stuff and spouting it back. The engaged students, in turn, make it a lot more fun (and challenging) for the Professors.</p>

<p>Some of the Professors really work hard to be innovative. My daughter had a class (on religion and current issues like abortion, death penalty, war, terrorism, etc.) this year in which all of the assignments were weekly "letters to the editor", podcasts, and major papers in the form of newspaper op-ed articles. I thought that was a creative approach for students writing about hotly contested issues from the perspective of religious and ethical considerations...and useful because it forced the students to think about communicating some fairly abstract philosophical ideas into writing that is relevant to a the real world.</p>

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<p>the narrow-mindedness is one of my biggest (and only) complaints about Swat. there are too many people on campus that instantly dislike people who, for example - don't believe in evolution, aren't pro-choice, support the Iraq War, etc. for example, one day a bunch of people decided to post pro-gay chalkings all over campus - fair enough, but some of them were explicit drawings of people having sex. homosexual or not, obviously a few people got annoyed at those and washed them out - the next day a lot of people complained about the "homophobia" of washing out those chalkings... if you can ignore those incidents (like most of us can) then it's no worry at all :)</p>

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<p>ugen64,
Are you implying that there was any kind of general consensus with regards to those chalkings? A lot of people complained about a lot of things, but there sure were plenty of opinions in every direction...</p>

10

<p>Yeah. I was going to say. The response to the gay chalkings was anything but homogenous. If anything, the sum total of the response as portrayed in three weeks of Phoenix coverage was that the chalkings went too far. </p>

<p>I thought that the student meeting on the subject sounded terrific, especially the way Professor Ratzman and Dorsey organized the students into six groups with differing opinions for an organized discussion. Attendance looked like it was substantial:</p>

<p>
[quote]
The chalkings discussion was held last Thursday evening at the Friends Meeting House and lasted for several hours. The two faculty facilitators for the dialogue were religion professor Elliot Ratzman and history professor Bruce Dorsey. </p>

<p>Initially, students were divided into six small groups based on their opinions and reasons for attending the discussion. The students in attendance represented a wide range of perspectives, from those that emphasized that they were offended by the confrontational and explicit nature of the messages to others that were offended by the responses to the chalkings. Each group presented several opinions on which they had come to a general consensus, after which the floor was open to all students.

[/quote]
</p>

<p><a href="http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2006-11-16/news/16613%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2006-11-16/news/16613&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>This sort of discussion doesn't occur at every campus. Nor does this degree of faculty engagement in the kind of discussion that is an extension of the classroom at Swarthmore. I compare this to the situation at Williams this year when a student replied to Holocaust Remembrance Day by papering students dorm room doors with Hitler posters. The only formal discussion was the Hillel group holding a open meeting in the student center with no more than two dozen students and NO members of the administration or faculty to help turn a very heated incident into a teaching moment.</p>

<p>BTW, from everthing I hear, Ratzman (who was just given a tenure track position) looks like he might become a real star in the Swarthmore teaching ranks.</p>

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<p>My d was freshman last year, and attended the chalkings discussion facilitated professors Ratzman and Dorsey. She was very impressed with the way the discussion was facilitated, and the way the students responded to one another because of facilitation. The whole issue of the chalkings, the meeting, and the student response to all of it was the main topic of conversation the next time we talked by phone. </p>

<p>When she got home for Thanksgiving as she told other members of the family about Swarthmore and why she was so happy with her choice of colleges, the way the chalkings were dealt with by the school was one of her prime examples of “how Swarthmore does things the right way.”</p>

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<p>Post 10 gives some of the coverage by the student weekly newspaper of the meeting held last fall to discuss the chalkings at Swarthmore. Below is the closing paragraph of the coverage of the same meeting in the Gazette which is Swarthmore’s daily online student newspaper. </p>

<p>This one paragraph pretty much sums up what I think a college learning experience should be.</p>

<p>“No conclusions were reached by the discussion. Yet resolution and consensus were not the point of last night's discussion. Rather, the goal of the dialogue, as stated by Dorsey and Ratzman at the outset of the evening, was to come away with a better understanding of others' perspectives and opinions of the issue, as well as the personal belief that one had thoughtfully expressed one's view and had thoughtfully listened to the opinions and views of others.”</p>

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<p>There are a couple of things that you have to keep in mind with surveys like this, besides the possibility of fake responses. For one thing, the only people who respond are those who choose to, who want to tell people what they feel about the school. Maybe the people who like Swarthmore are too involved in it to bother posting on that site. Also, you can't really compare responses between schools, because students at each school will have different expectations and standards against which they will make their judgment.</p>

<p>I've spoken to some Swarthmore grads who loved it and some who definitely didn't, but they all agreed that they got a great education.</p>

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<p>The student review site is pretty funny. They must also have mistaken Swarthmore for Skidmore like everyone else.</p>

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<p>I think the giveaway that some of those reviews are hoaxes are the comments that the professors don't care about the students. That doesn't fit with what anyone, anytime, anyplace has said about Swarthmore.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
I think the giveaway that some of those reviews are hoaxes are the comments that the professors don't care about the students. That doesn't fit with what anyone, anytime, anyplace has said about Swarthmore.

[/quote]

That'd be totally wrong. Your 100% sunny attitude toward Swarthmore sometimes leads you to make some erroneous statements and resort to hyperbole. If you think there aren't professors at Swarthmore who don't care about the students, you'd be dead wrong. I would say that, on average, they care about the students more than you find at a typical college campus (especially larger ones with graduate programs), but it doesn't render Swarthmore immune to criticism in this area, since some of the faculty certainly aren't concerned with the well-being of the students.</p>

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<p>So did you write those five reviews that gave Swarthmore a "D" for academics?</p>

<p>I think it would hard for a Swarthmore student to take 28 courses and honestly come away with the impression that the professors (as a group) didn't care about their students.</p>

<p>That kind of evaluation would have to come from a very bitter student and/or a student who struggled with the demands of Swarthmore academics. For example, my daughter had a professor throw the whole class out one day because he felt they had not adequately prepared for the discussion. I suppose you could say that "he didn't care about his students."</p>

<p>It's not my "sunny" evaluation. Read the accreditation reports written by visiting teams of college presidents and professors. The most recent one was led by the President of Oberlin College. Read the comments of an outsider, like Jim Larrimore, who comes from Dartmouth and observes the student/faculty interaction at Swarthmore. Look at the student turnout for a debate between three professors about the relative importance of the three divisions.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
So did you write those five reviews that gave Swarthmore a "D" for academics?</p>

<p>I think it would hard for a Swarthmore student to take 28 courses and honestly come away with the impression that the professors (as a group) didn't care about their students.</p>

<p>That kind of evaluation would have to come from a very bitter student and/or a student who struggled with the demands of Swarthmore academics. For example, my daughter had a professor throw the whole class out one day because he felt they had not adequately prepared for the discussion. I suppose you could say that "he didn't care about his students."</p>

<p>It's not my "sunny" evaluation. Read the accreditation reports written by visiting teams of college presidents and professors. The most recent one was led by the President of Oberlin College. Read the comments of an outsider, like Jim Larrimore, who comes from Dartmouth and observes the student/faculty interaction at Swarthmore. Look at the student turnout for a debate between three professors about the relative importance of the three divisions.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>That's all great, but it doesn't address my point: not 100% of the professors at Swarthmore care about the students. I think it would be hard, as you say, for a student to graduate and come away with the impression that the professors didn't care about him (as a group), but you have implied in your posts that all of the professors care about all of the students. I think it would be very easy for a student to come away thinking that about 80%-90% of his professors cared about him, but the rest did not. I think this is especially true of more than a few professors when it comes to students who are not majoring or minoring in their subject of expertise.</p>

<p>Your example is irrelevant and your suggestion that I am one of the students who gave a "D" to Swarthmore in academics is borderline ad hominem and has nothing to do with the argument. If you want to try and tell us that all of the professors at Swarthmore care about the students, then I think you're selling something, because that's obviously BS.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
That's all great, but it doesn't address my point: not 100% of the professors at Swarthmore care about the students. I think it would be hard, as you say, for a student to graduate and come away with the impression that the professors didn't care about him (as a group), but you have implied in your posts that all of the professors care about all of the students. I think it would be very easy for a student to come away thinking that about 80%-90% of his professors cared about him, but the rest did not.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I've never implied any such thing. It would be absurd to think that 100% of the professors at a college are fantastic professors who care deeply about their students. There are professors at Swarthmore to avoid...although, interestingly, there is often disagreement among students where one student loves taking courses from a professor and another didn't.</p>

<p>Out of the 20 courses my daughter has taken, she would probably say 3 have been disappointing. In one, she felt the reading assigments could have been better, although she is close to the professor. In a second, she enjoyed the material immensely, but felt the professor tried to orient the course a bit too much towards discussion given the size of the class. In a third, she loved the material, but thought the professor was a bit too much of a "character" -- her own fault, she had plenty of warning. On the flip side, she's had about 2 professors per semester that she raves about.</p>

<p>The 80% to 90% figure you suggest is a stunningly high number. That's precisely my point. With those kinds of percentages, how can anyone legitimately give Swarthmore a "D" for academics? It's the kind of grade that's absurd on the face of it.</p>

<p>Read Tim Burke's blog -- frequently mostly by college professors. He routinely talks about how much fun teaching at Swarthmore is and other professors see his syllabi and comment about how much they envy him teaching at a place like Swarthmore.</p>

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<p>In the last 24 months I have had the opportunity to talk to perhaps 60 people who are connected to Swarthmore College in one way or the other. The best summary of Swarthmore, its administration, students, and community in general, came last year on moving in day. I was dropping my daughter off for her freshman year. I stopped to talk to one of the grounds keepers and ask him about the school. I ask him, how do the students treat you, how about the administration, how are they to work for? I wanted to know what life at Swarthmore was like for a grounds keeper, an ordinary Joe. He looked at me, smiled and said, “No place is perfect, but Swarthmore comes close.” </p>

<p>Do 100% of the professors at Swarthmore care about 100% of the students 100% of the time? I doubt it, “no place is perfect," the best any of us can do is try to come close. </p>

<p>Swarthmore is a small, close knit community, very little goes on that does not become common knowledge quickly. A professor who did not care for or about the students would more than likely not be hired, and if s/he were some how hired, would not last long.</p>