Marist College

Marist has a ton of potential to be a great school, but it just isn't. The main problem I'm having now is housing. When visiting Marist, they advertised the amazing housing, and told us how great it is. Going into my Junior year, however, I'm now realizing that this fantastic housing is severely limited. They keep accepting more and more freshman, with nowhere to put them. So they put them in Sophomore housing. Then the Sophomores get the Junior housing. Now because housing is not guaranteed for Juniors or Seniors, it has become a vicious battle of "priority points." These points are how Marist distributes housing. The more you have, the better housing you get. It's an EXTREMELY flawed system, and is based almost solely on extracurricular activities. I will most likely not get any housing and be forced to live off-campus in the City of Poughkeepsie... a place you definitely do not want to live.Just be warned that the "beautiful housing" Marist offers is not guaranteed and that you could be stuck somewhere in Poughkeepsie.

2nd Year Female -- Class 2016

Campus Aesthetics: A, University Resource Use/ spending: D-

I only spent one semester at Marist because I was so upset over a number of things about the college. That being said, for all the bad things I had to put up with, the good things were considerable enough to help balance them.

Negatives:
-The Financial Aid and Admissions departmenst were very misleading as to the amount of aid and grant money I could expect to receive. This was just my experience with them, so you may have better luck but they pretty much completely lied to me and I ended up having to take out a $10K loan to pay for one semester.

-Some of the teachers design their classes around the idea that the students have a large disposable income. I had a teacher tell me that I needed to buy a Blackberry or Smart Phone and a laptop if I wanted to pass her class.

-The BUS group projects often require spending a good amount of additional money in order to complete them. For one class my group had to develop a business plan for an existing restaurant. Part of our assignment was to eat out each week at the surrounding competition. This became very expensive very quickly. For another class, my teacher required the groups to invest in a specific presenting software just for the one project.

-A lot of the teachers and students are not overly friendly towards commuters.
-Club events and meetings are usually held within the dorms and around 9pm (which can be difficult for commuters to attend or find out about)

-School clubs/activities/and events are primarily only advertised within dorm buildings (which are not freely open to commuters)

-Parking is very difficult. All students are assigned a lot to park in and most of them are quite a distance from the academic buildings. They also do not take into account which dorm you may be living in or buildings you'll be taking classes in when assigning students a lot. This can be a great hassle during the winter months when NY gets a small ton of snow.

-They do not have any computer labs in which classes are not being held throughout the day. This can be a great source of frustration since the library computers are almost always being used.

-Half of the computer labs don't have printers. You pretty much have to go to the library or writing center if you need to print anything and hope they'll have a computer free.

-Many of the Marist credits are not transferable or applicable to the business degrees at other schools.

-They have a large number of teachers not originally from the United States-- who while being very nice people, are not always terribly easy to understand. My microeconomics teacher had a VERY thick accent and was nearly unintelligible. He also could not spell and had terrible penmanship, so what he wrote on the board was difficult to understand as well. Another of my teachers was from India and while she was much easier to understand verbally, her written directions/questions on assignments tended to be very confusing.

-Some of the campus buildings are hard to navigate.
-Partying is a big part of the on-campus life. This could be a positive thing depending on what your interests are but campus resident students are ALWAYS talking about some party that happened the night before and often come into morning classes hung over or still drunk-- even in the middle of the week.

-The student body is made up of a lot of "older" freshmen who are not very friendly to actual teenage students. My brother used to tag along with me to some of the school events (he was 17 at the time) and he was always getting looks from the other (primarily older) students.

-The Hudson can smell TERRIBLE during summer months (in part due to families and businesses using fertilizers along the water front-- which helps cause a build up of this extremely bad smelling muck in the water.)

-Over the past few years NY has been experiencing increasingly bad winters. Expect a lot of snow, sleet and ice if you are not used to the area.

-Also, because of the layout of the buildings and the fact that Marist is right on the water, it creates a wind tunnel effect at the heart of the campus and temperatures can easily be ~10 degrees lower than in town. Although you'd swear it feels more like 20 degrees lower while you're walking through it.

-All bills/class scheduling/ and pertinent department information is found/done strictly online and many of the departments do not seem to know or understand how the website and computer systems work. This can be very frustrating if you encounter an error or need help. Also, many departments DO NOT tell you that everything is done only online- so it is easy to miss scheduling dates or bill due dates and incur additional charges.

Positives:
-The school requires all students to meet with their councilor and to become fully aware of what they need to do in order to graduate on time on starting their first semester and again before being allowed to schedule classes for the next semester.

-For every bad teacher there seems to be a good one. My English teacher was completely disgusted with the excess expenses some of my other teachers required me to lay out and designed her assignments around making her students think outside of the box. My philosophy teacher (Peter Raoul-Mar) was beyond incredible. It was like having Harriet Tubman for a teacher- and I can easily say that her class completely transformed how I view the world and my own role within it. Honestly, she is such a fantastic teacher and human being that I would recommend going to Marist if only to take her class.

-The campus is beautiful and well maintained.
-Your degree will matter to the outside world.
-The student body is made up of kids from all over the country. This gives you the chance to get to know a lot of different kinds of people.

For me, the negatives outweighed the good the school had to offer.

1st Year Female -- Class 2011

Education Quality: A+, Collaboration/Competitive: C-

If you are a commuter, do not let the Commuter Advocates convince you that commuters are welcome on campus. I am very outgoing and put strong efforts into fitting in on campus ... and I was unbelievably disappointed to find out how much B.S. it was.

- Security makes it too difficult for freshman to spend time with other freshman in the first weeks of school (the crucial time for making friends).

- The only questions students care to ask are "What year are you?" "Where do you live?" "Do you go out?" If you do not go out at night (which is difficult because students living on campus are too stuck up to invite commuters to stay in their dorm and the Poughkeepsie cabs are too illegitimate to take for more than 10 minutes), students do not care to be your friend.

- Students say to join clubs. Well, I did ... And the meetings were no earlier than 9:15 PM, even intramural sports (very inconvenient). Not to mention, meetings/games last about 15 minutes, making the drive there or the hours you spend waiting there a complete waste.

- Professors are all about group projects. I understand this is how much of the business world works today, but students are rarely willing to meet any earlier than 10 AM and prefer to meet late at night (again, very inconvenient).

- Students, besides other commuters, do not understand why you may not be able to afford $12,000 on top of the $28,000 tuition to live two minutes from campus rather than 20. They do not understand why mommy and daddy would not pay the extra "pocket change."

- Parking is horrible, especially with an entire section being removed for the completely unnecessary "underpass." Security gives anyone and everyone a parking permit, even students who live in the dorms that have a path directly to the "underpass." The two commuter lots are the gym parking lot and the lot across the street from campus. Well, students drive their cars to the gym (hmmm...) and class from across the street or across campus (across is not that far), taking up many of the spots that people who cannot walk to class because they live 20 minutes away (driving distance).

Aside from those commuter-related comments, I am in my third year and only now am getting professors that have legitimate knowledge and experience in the best-of-the-best of their fields of work. The first two years were full of adjuncts, AKA your everyday man/woman with a job who needs some extra cash and feels like teaching from a textbook is all college classes are. I could have gone to community college for no cost at all and gotten better professors; unfortunately, the Marist name looks better on a resume. Now my professors have plenty of experience in their fields, but because they have so much experience, they believe it is their way or the highway; if you do not follow their exact rules, you will fail in life. I am studying Creative Advertising; my ideas, which are found creative by the many people I ask, are immediately replaced by the ideas a professor has from her experience. What happened to the "creative" part?

The students, overall, are all the same: snooty (even if they swear they are not), self-absorbed, rude.

Fashion students have many times looked disgustingly at my more "rock alternative" attire. If you try to be different, students are simply disgusted, confused.

The only thing I'll give Marist is that it is absolutely beautiful. It stole my heart with its looks, meanwhile I already live here. Unfortunately, that is one of the only places you see those high tuition dollars going to.I come home in a bad mood everyday from this school. The professors, the students,

2nd Year Female -- Class 2013

Campus Aesthetics: A+, Education Quality: F