It's not accurate to say that Hampshire students design the curriculum. We got to pick our own courses to design a *major*, sure, but you get to do that at plenty of colleges these days. Hampshire students do sometimes get to teach courses over January intersession, but the college oversees these and they do not carry the credit of a semester course.
Like a handful of the folks who have commented on this article over at MetaFilter, I also went to Hampshire, and of course I think this article is full of hyperbole. While Hampshire doesn't have the name recognition which gets Harvard students into jobs they don't deserve straight out of undergrad, there are fields where people respect Hampshire's perspective on learning (film, social sciences, education, and believe it or not, science). And I'm proof that a Hampshire degree isn't necessarily a disadvantage -- I'm a doctoral student at Columbia now. If I remember correctly, the statistic on grad school admissions when I graduated was that 90% of Hampshire grads who applied to grad school got into their first choice school.
Yes, Hampshire is way too friggin expensive (though last I checked some 70% of students received some kind of financial aid, so the only saps paying full tuition are the same silver-spoon babies who'd be paying full tuition at any school), and yes, it has its faults (that yurt in the picture... don't get me started), but I never would have learned to be such a self-starter and so unafraid of managing large projects if Hampshire hadn't given me the chance to learn what life was like without tying my success to grades and classes, and if I hadn't had to do a thesis to graduate.
Go ahead and mock Hampshire -- we really didn't need superficial Radar-reading hipsters applying, anyway.
And by the way, "On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored" is the title of a book on psychoanalysis by Adam Phillips -- don't blame Hampshire for that one.
It's not accurate to say that Hampshire students design the curriculum. We got to pick our own courses to design a *major*, sure, but you get to do that at plenty of colleges these days. Hampshire students do sometimes get to teach courses over January intersession, but the college oversees these and they do not carry the credit of a semester course.
Like a handful of the folks who have commented on this article over at MetaFilter, I also went to Hampshire, and of course I think this article is full of hyperbole. While Hampshire doesn't have the name recognition which gets Harvard students into jobs they don't deserve straight out of undergrad, there are fields where people respect Hampshire's perspective on learning (film, social sciences, education, and believe it or not, science). And I'm proof that a Hampshire degree isn't necessarily a disadvantage -- I'm a doctoral student at Columbia now. If I remember correctly, the statistic on grad school admissions when I graduated was that 90% of Hampshire grads who applied to grad school got into their first choice school.
Yes, Hampshire is way too friggin expensive (though last I checked some 70% of students received some kind of financial aid, so the only saps paying full tuition are the same silver-spoon babies who'd be paying full tuition at any school), and yes, it has its faults (that yurt in the picture... don't get me started), but I never would have learned to be such a self-starter and so unafraid of managing large projects if Hampshire hadn't given me the chance to learn what life was like without tying my success to grades and classes, and if I hadn't had to do a thesis to graduate.
Go ahead and mock Hampshire -- we really didn't need superficial Radar-reading hipsters applying, anyway.
And by the way, "On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored" is the title of a book on psychoanalysis by Adam Phillips -- don't blame Hampshire for that one.