See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/26/colleges-not-worth-their_n_659281.html#s116461 for BusinessWeek's ' Colleges NOT Worth Their Tuition: 20 institutions of higher education with the highest tuition and lowest ROI ' based on PayScale's database.
Whittier College President Sharon Herzberger has tried to discredit PayScale's database and this BusinessWeek article, but the truth is that Whittier's ROI is even worse than PayScale and BusinessWeek state - because the unusually high percentage of unemployed and underemployed Whittier College grads, the ever growing number of Whittier College dropouts burdened by five to six figures of education debt, and increasing overcrowding and its consequences, aren't factored into PayScale/BusinessWeek calculations.
BusinessWeek/PayScale make the increasingly false assumption that Whittier College students will graduate in four years. Whittier College continues to overenroll students - and periodically announces that, without new dormitory construction, still more students will be enrolled in coming academic years! This practice already results in more and more students having to live in non-residential spaces housing as many as six students per converted storage room, lounge, and even classroom - beyond the practice of turning dorm rooms for two into rooms for three or even four, beyond the Pale. Prospective Whittier student families are misled to expect student rooms typical of a small liberal arts college, not these barracks-like accomodations. While the unusually high Whittier attrition rate eliminates a number of these ad hoc student living spaces by spring term, nearly all Whittier College students are stuck in some form of overcrowded housing for their entire academic year.
The result of overcrowding is not only a quality of life issue, including student health as well as study space and time and personal privacy issues, outrageous, along with the dilapitated state of the Whittier College dorms, in itself, but this also makes graduating in five or even six years, not four, the norm. Getting needed let alone wanted courses at Whittier has become increasingly difficult and is more and more simply impossible, and yet Whittier continues to still further exacerbate this problem by continuing its first come/first served course reservation system. This fact is not accounted for by BusinessWeek /PayScale, resulting in a significant overstatement of the Whittier College ROI.
When our hard science majors crunched the numbers they found Whittier College's ROI is more likely a negative investment, that tuition exceeds income. This is certainly a regrettable fact of life for many former and increasingly likely for future Whittier College students..
Sharon Herzberger lamely, and desperately, tried wishing away Whittier's dismal ROI through an email to Bloomberg.com in which she cited alumni like Dick Nixon - Whittier College grads whose lives only further red flag Whittier College - suggesting Herzberger and Whittier College make no distinction between famous and infamous, as well as the fact that there's no way to refute the numbers, only to distract attention from them. Indeed, the more Herzberger tries to dispel legitimate, urgent, concerns about Whittier College, the deeper a hole she digs - for student families as well as for the College and herself. Despite Herzberger's denials and red herrings, no matter how one crunches the numbers, Whittier College is one of the worst investments in higher education a student family can make.
As you can see on whittiergate's ' Whittier College and the Financial Aid Scandal: Buyer Beware! ' page, a studentsreview survey of Whittier College graduates revealed - before the ongoing recession broke near the end of George W. Bush's second term - that 50% of Whittier graduates were unemployed and only a third of those working were employed in a field even just related to their major. These facts aren't that surprising when one considers that pretty much anyone can get into Whittier College, academically unqualified Latino students are being recruited out of fear that Whittier's dependence on defrauding the federal Hispanic-Serving Institutions program will be stopped, and millions of fraudulently obtained federal taxpayer dollars be ordered repaid, that students can create majors that may have no relevance to employment, and that academic cheating at Whittier goes unchallenged.
The last straw: Whittier College President Sharon Herzberger and her fellow Trustees recently announced that tuition will be raised yet again for the 2011-2012 academic year! If Whittier College continues with its current fiscal policies, it's only a matter of time before Whittier will offer the very worst ROI of any college in the United States, to which dubious distinction this school is already much, much too close; too close to go to Whittier College. Go Poets? Unless there are dramatic changes at Whittier College, Go Elsewhere.