I looked at Swarthmore before applying to colleges, and chose not to come here. Later, I became friends with a large number of people on the campus, and ultimately spent a lot more time here.
There are a lot of very strong points about this school. It's kind of a given that the academics are high-powered, and that it's small and the students get a lot of individualized attention. What people may not realize without visiting is that it has a quirky, zany, and somewhat campy element to the student culture that I find is really likeable most of the time. The students here tend to have diverse interests and abilities; they are not quite as overly focused or narrow as at some of the other more high-powered schools.
There is one thing that I do not like about Swarthmore; it was evident when I visited for the first time, and it became increasingly evident when I later befriended a number of students here. It is:
(1) A focus on achievement at the expense of self-motivated, self-directed learning. One could say that the students here are "driven", but what does this mean? I've found that the students here consistently care about achieving "within the system" so to speak...that is, following rules, jumping through hoops, and getting good grades. When people have spoken about the academics here with me, they speak often about how hard they work, and how hard it is to do well in the classes here, but how most people do well anyway. I find the following page on Swarthmore's website telling:
http://www.swarthmore.edu/student-life/new-students/academics/grades-and-reviews.xml
I don't like this. I wish people would focus first and foremost on learning, and see grades and other tangible achievements as less important. I also believe that education works better when students take more responsibility on themselves for evaluating their own progress.
I also think that defining your self-worth as a function of your academic achievement, which I think the culture at Swarthmore encourages, is a very dangerous and harmful practice--one which can lead to depression when people fail, and which can lead to haughty and arrogant statements (which I've heard come out of Swarthmore students' and grads' mouths a few times) when people are succeeding within the system. I bring this up because it's something I personally struggle with--the idea that I'm smarter or better than someone else because I am good at achieving something within a certain system. I find this idea to be very self-destructive, and I do think the culture and environment at Swarthmore unfortunately encourages this way of thinking more than I am comfortable with.
I also think that this sort of culture does not prepare people for the real world. In most jobs and business environments that I've worked in, employees have needed to have a strong internal sense of how to evaluate their own work, and how to maintain consistent quality in the absence of quantitative feedback. My experience with environments that focus intensely on grades is that they often disable students' internal ability to assess their own work and their own level of knowledge, as they start shaping their whole way of thinking around giving the professor what is needed to achieve an A. They also seem to get sucked into a culture of working long hours, even when such focus is not actually the best way to get good results. The result is usually a loss of sleep and balance in life. I also have seen people struggle with this in graduate school, so I'd be cautious about the ability of a school like Swarthmore to adequately prepare students for the sort of self-directed study that helps someone to thrive in a graduate school environment too.
This is all just my own experience. If I were to suggest ways for Swarthmore to improve as a college, it would be to address the culture of grades and academics. Yes, it will be tough to change, but I think it can be done, both from the top-down (an administration leading the way) and from the bottom-up (through student activism, or perhaps even through alumni influence) if the school can make a rock-solid commitment to learning for the sake of learning, and work on phasing out the role that grades and achievement play in the academic environment there.
I also think the benefits of switching to a less grades-oriented and achievement-oriented environment would be immense, and could help Swarthmore become a true global leader in education. read more
