<p>i appreciate the concerns that swatgirl13 raises. for someone looking at swat as a place to spend the next four years, her issues are reflective of how the school runs (or doesn’t run).</p>
<p>i do not appreciate the tone of parents suggesting that their college experiences has anything to do with swatgirl13’s posting. to lecture, to belittle, to infer that her thoughts are not worthy of conversation says more about you parents than whether swatgirl13 should load the printer herself, buy a coffeemaker or transfer to another school.</p>
<p>I appreciate–as a current student–the fact that Swarthmore’s quality of life may not be the best in the country, but that Swarthmore’s education certainly contends for the same accolade.</p>
<p>eh? DOD that’s a completely moot point. the fact of the matter is none of her problems would exist if she took a <em>little</em> initiative in fixing them; proactiveness, as opposed to logging onto collegeconfidential to whine about them. </p>
<p>students and parents did concede legitimate points (e.g. food hours are really annoying) but on the whole i think the OP is going to get the “conversation” you seem to think she deserves when she raises issues of consequence.</p>
<p>though they seem a bit obtuse, and though you don’t appreciate them, the anecdotes that parents are bringing into the conversation point out the fact that the youth of today, and swatties, are quite adept at complaining.</p>
<p>“I know of no other school that offers unlimited free printing (not that they don’t exist, but it certainly is not the norm…)”</p>
<p>This isn’t meant to take anything away from Swat, but I thought free printing is standard at any of the usual suspect LACs. I know from experience of at least 1 other LAC (with a much smaller endowment) that provides free printing. I assume that any school with similar or larger endowment would have this as well (well, except for Bryn Mawr… they use to come over to print their papers at HC…).</p>
<p>I had assumed that would be the case…until I saw this thread during a two-week period when my son was going on college visits. I tagged along on tours when I was his ride to a college and, for no reason other than I found this thread to be amusing, I paid special attention to the printing thing. I’m not sure why, but that was the one question I allowed myself to ask the tour guides. At all of the campuses he visited (he had already visited Haverford and took the train to Swarthmore so I missed that one), the response was that printing is done with some sort of fee component, although some provide for an allowance. How that works varies, so that at Xerlin a student might get 300 pages per semester. At Xilliams they get 500. At Xale, Xherst and Xleyan…well, it’s pay as you go. This could add up, couldn’t it? Hmmmm…maybe I should have paid closer attention!</p>
<p>Can’t speak to Swarthmore in particular, but I will say, I did pay attention on college tours for policies surrounding printing and other amenities. There are differences in “feel” of campuses where the approach is more “all inclusive” and others “a la carte”. Often the differences are subtle and certainly not a big deal at all, but on a day to day basis there is a difference living in a situation where you feel like you are being nickel and dimed for every little thing, where there are constantly little hassles to deal with versus the ease of having things “run like butter” and not having to cough up the extra change for services, especially if the tuition is identical in both cases.</p>
<p>I feel competent to comment further on this subject since I have a freshman at Swarthmore and a freshman at Northwestern. Yes to printing fees at Northwestern. Additionally, anytime freshman at Northwestern wants to go see friends in a show or a cappella concert, it costs him $5. Semi-big name performer on campus, $20. Trust me, this all adds up. Yes, there are tons more performances on Northwestern’s campus, but after a while he has to pick and choose amongst the ones he wants to see because all those $5 fees start to add up. As parents we see on the tuition bill “athletic fees” each quarter, as well as “social dues” quarterly for the dorm. It is so much simpler at Swat where you pay the price and everything is included. And Northwestern’s total bill is larger.</p>
<p>Uh oh. I’m kind of a heavy gamer, so is it true that Swarthmore’s internet is bad? I would assume that the OP was referring to their wireless network, which shouldn’t be a problem since I always use wired. But can anyone tell me if the actual ISP is slow? Or if anyone could run a speedtest and post the results? Of course, I guess gaming isn’t that much of a priority in college =(</p>
<p>Swarthmore is hard-wire connected to major trunk line and pays for a ton of bandwidth. The ISP is Swarthmore. The wired bandwidth definitely does not “suck”. Like most colleges, I think they do run bandwidth shaping software that would keep any one user from eating up the bandwidth for a thousand users.</p>
<p>I’m sure the OP was complaining about her wireless not being perfect. That’s kind of a fact of life with wireless in college dormitories.</p>
<p>^
I think that is a fact for wireless in general. I couldn’t tell you how many times my wireless at home or school has suddenly dropped me or slowed down considerably. </p>
<p>How many megabits per second does the internet at Swarthmore run? Can one access the internet from anywhere on the campus?</p>
<p>Swarthmore increased the network bandwidth from 60 MB/s to 100 MB/s in Summer 2009. At the same time, they increased the bandwidth to each in-bound (wired and wireless) dorm connection from 1 MB/s to 3 MB/s.</p>
<p>Last spring, Swarthmore increased the bandwidth again, from 100 MB/s to 160 MB/s. They don’t say if they increased the cap on each connection, but I doubt it. The additional bandwidth probably went to serve more people simultaneously streaming movies and stuff.</p>