Temple University

Horrible dorms- room was consistently 87-89F maintenance refused to fix it 5 times. Mice swarm in back of J&H, no one cared and reported to health dept no change ever. Insane billing and fine practices, even worse than the average. I switched majors 3 times and got decent snapshots of 3 programs and 2 campuses. Main campus is a brutalist pit designed to get blood from stones. Tell them you can't eat anything to get out of the mandatory meal plan. Tell them you will be living with a relative and skip the mandatory year in dorms. Do not trust the bursar- they will rob your financial aid and merit ASAP. All they want from you is cash and at every step all systems and administrators are there to minimize and gaslight you and your problems. The head of the honors program threatened to ?destroy my academic career? and blew up at me for asking for their help twice in 6 months. This school has some incredible professors (1/10) but the casual cruelty of their bosses and administrators makes getting an education here a brutal lesson in the dispassionate barbarity of big institutions. Need a health check or therapy? Fill out 10 forms for 15 minutes to have someone tell you to come back next time. Don't try to work and take fewer classes than you think you can handle. Temple constantly re-rigs the credit system so virtually all students will take 6 years to graduate without tons of crunch time. They want you to take a decade to matriculate: you will meet ?super-seniors? who have been at temple for a decade or more taking a few credits a semester. My real advice if you ended up here? Transfer. For the love of god transfer out. The whole place is cursed. The land the school is built on was stolen using eminent domain and the neighborhoods still hate everyone at temple. Cecil B Moore was once the jazz capital of the US. Now it's a wasteland of hideous slabs and 10? fencing. Ambler campus is nicer, but being destroyed from within- it's not profitable enough so they've been shutting down more and more buildings and trying to put all the classes in one spot. The horticulture program is dying. Botany is a joke with ancient equipment and labs.

Campus and near will never be safe because the school is an open wound to north philly- which has plenty of those to begin with. You will get zero post graduation support or help with finding work. This schools graduation rate is horrible and they will not help. In fact they will hit you up for money within a year of graduating. They will also delete your student email ASAP, and never tell you they slapped some fines on your acct just as you were leaving. With interest and fees these tiny fines will be thousands of dollars if you need your transcript or a copy of your diploma. Good luck and get out ASAP. Also please remember a lot of the programs are fake. E.g. there is no Portuguese faculty, but they list it in all the literature. You can do self study under the Spanish department, but that's it. There's dozens of programs like this that only exist on paper to entrap you.Overall I wish I had gone to a better school- temple pulled my year's merit aid a month before 1st semester for 5 years? to grow the endowment. I was early admissions and was totally blind sided. It still seemed cheaper than NYU, brown etc- boy was I wrong. The sticker price is a complete lie, I ended up paying what they still quote as total cost every semester. I had to beg my family every month and had to deal with holds messing up my schedule. I was also working multiple part time jobs on and off and was always out of food. These may sound like individual problems- but the bursar and other services (sauna-like dorms, inedible food) we're dramatically compounded by how bad temple's services are. And there's really no one to go to for help or assistance. Every office is designed to deflect people away and do as little work as possible. I met plenty of sympathetic professors who tried to give me advice, but ultimately Temple is a crushing machine that crushes students and drains their cash and future earnings but doesn't put them back together again. Stay away.

Alumnus Male -- Class 2000

I am a freshman who is transferring after only one semester here at Temple. I am in the Global Studies major. I am from rural PA and I believe that Temple did everything they could to pull the wool over the eyes of prospective students about many things.

First, I want to speak about the positives of Temple.
1) Philadelphia is a cool city and there is something for everyone to do/see.
2) The students at Temple are mostly really nice people.
3) The academic side of Temple isn't bad really, I did learn some valuable things during my time here.

Now on to the negatives of Temple.
When I went to the "Experience Temple Day" I didn't know it then but I was being fed a huge crock of sh*t. All they talked about was how safe Temple was and how big the police force is. Bull. In my time here, I have witnessed the infamous riot of 200 juveniles on Broad St and the horse punching incident. I know multiple people who have been robbed. There have also been countless assaults of Temple students simply walking close to or on campus. I recall one girl who was beaten with a rock by Anderson Hall. Temple is not a safe campus. Yeah it is lit up but that didn't seem to help the armed robberies and reports of gun shots that plastered my phone from the TU alerts all semester long.

Next is the problem that would be easiest to solve. Temple has the worst bureaucracy in the world! I recall reading on this website about Temple's staff and faculty being terrible and boy are they right. I had a horrible time trying to get my bill paid and I would sit on hold with the financial aid office for HOURS. This isn't just in the faculty at Temple, it goes down to the RAs and residential life directors of the dorms. I had a problem with my roommate doing pills in my room and all he received was a slap on the wrist. My friend down the hall has a similar problem with his roommate and nothing was done. Temple punishes the victims in cases like these and nobody cares about you. Another example, my good friend had his guest card taken away because he had alcohol on Halloween night. OK, fine. Do the crime, do the time. He waits the 10 days for the violation then after the 10 days were up he went to retrieve his card back from the front desk. But, the card somehow disappeared in those 10 days. They couldn't find it anywhere. My friend was sent all over to different offices to try and find this card and nobody could find it. So, even with him asking every week he had to wait until December to get his card back.

With that being said, I am glad that I could experience life in North Philadelphia. I made a few really good friends here and I am grateful for that. Also I don't believe Temple is representative of all of Philly. I feel that if somehow magically Temple could be picked up and physically moved to south philly or really anywhere out of North Philly it would be exponentially better.

I truly feel that Temple was riding off of their good football season in 2015-16 to pull more students in and get their money. They know how to market well. I'm happy to leave and I look forward to not feeling unsafe in walking around outside.

1st Year Male -- Class 1920

Faculty Accessibility: A, University Resource Use/ spending: F

This university is simply awful. It employs the most incompetent and disrespectful people I have ever met. There have been a total of three professors throughout my whole college career here that were good at their jobs and were helpful. Temple frequently messes up on financial issues and then makes you feel guilty for their mistakes and makes you wait until they eventually fix it after calling and waiting on hold 6 times. The food staff is just horrible. They are rude and ignorant. I could not be more dissatisfied with my last four years of an educational experience. I feel that the work I have done will be worthwhile, but the cost at which to get my degree has been unnecessarily difficult. The surrounding area is unbelievable unsafe. I have witnessed gun shots in front of my apartment not too far off of campus as well as hearing about sexual assaults and robberies at gunpoint around my home.

4th Year Female -- Class 2017

Surrounding City: A-, Faculty Accessibility: F