Nestled on a husk of yellowing grass in the middle of a blighted urban war zone, UB is remarkable solely for its ability to survive. And, as it happens, the Worst College in America remains open for business only because of an unlikely savior.Bridgeport charges $39,000 per year and graduates 33 percent of students within four years.
On the verge of extinction in the early 1990s, the university was rescued from bankruptcy by an arm of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, which offered up a multimillion-dollar miracle. The Moonies' endowment eventually earned the former head of the church a position as university president, and a head scratch from the academic world. Alumni were horrified to learn that a cult long accused of fraud, high-pressure recruitment tactics, and wrenching troubled kids from their parents had effectively mounted a takeover of their alma mater.
Tragically, new students often discover this the hard way. "Scared for my life. UB run by Moonies. Ghetto-type atmosphere," one panicked freshman wrote on an online message board. Of course, if you think the administration is dicey, try leaving your dorm for a stroll in the quad. "The campus is bordered by high-crime neighborhoods," writes a concerned grad, recalling the "naivete and innocence" of incoming students. "They'd trustingly tour the campus and surrounding area by foot and get mugged or killed." The city's violent crime rate is 60 percent above the national average, and over the past two years it has increased by another 6 percent.
For the past decade, incoming students have been presented with "personal alarm locators," portable panic buttons that summon security in the likely event of an emergency.
Despite all this, the university managed to boost its undergraduate enrollment by 6 percent last year, in large part due to its aggressive recruitment of unwitting international students, who make up a whopping 25 percent of the student body. "If you're a foreign student, UB appears to be a lush resort campus conveniently located along beautiful beachfront property," writes one alum about the school's international marketing efforts. (According to its official literature, UB borders "some of the finest sandy beaches between New York and Cape Cod.")
Although RADAR is in the humor business, it raises a legitimate point: There really ought to be a widely noted guide to America's worst colleges. All of the institutions jostling for the top spot on the traditional U.S. News list are, for the most part, perfectly fine. You could probably throw a dart at the Top 50 and get a decent education as long as you put in the work. And the students who attend those institutions have the most access to information and ability to make informed choices. People didn't need U.S. News to tell them to apply to Stanford or M.I.T. before the rankings were founded in 1983.
The students who really need guidance are those who are in danger of attending a legitimately terrible college or university, someplace that will take tens of thousands of your dollars and provide little or nothing in return. The stakes for those students are a lot higher than for someone choosing between Amherst and Brown. But since identifying the lowest performers is considered impolite in higher education, these kinds of things get left to satire publications, when really they should be in the hands of guidance counselors and parents across the country so they can steer students clear of places like UB.
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As U.S. News and World Report and Princeton Review come out with their highly-publicized lists of the best colleges in the United States, one magazine dares to be different. Radar magazine has ranked the worst colleges in the country based as judged by criteria such as "incompetent professors, rock-bottom admissions standards and unbridled alcohol and drug consumption." The Radar editors call it a "semi-scientific" guide.
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oliviaharis
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I almost never express my opinion in public or on the Internet, but when I saw this story about the University of Bridgeport on the web, I felt compelled, as a graduate of the University's MBA program in 1983, to respond to it and to the subsequent comments written about it. But, before I start, I must provide a disclaimer. Although, most see me as an educated person of average or above average intelligence, I am not an exceptionally good writer, and am most certainly capable of making spelling and even more egregious writing errors. I am completely aware that within the realm of debate, on and off the Internet, there exists a well worn debate strategy of attempting to disqualify an opposing person's augment by impeaching the person's speaking or writing ability that has nothing to do with the central point being made. My lack of writing excellence is not, and should not, be viewed as reason to disqualify the validity of my statements and opinions.
As an impoverished child growing up on welfare in the inner city of some of the worst slums in America I dreamed. I dreamed of one day of escaping the inner city poverty, condemnation, and crippling low expectations that others of better circumstances of life were forcing on me. What I dared to dream, as a young child, was so much like that of the dreams of millions of other young idealist Americans that passionately believed in what the United States stood for. What I dared to dream was simply the American dream; of success through diligence, determination, integrity, and hard work. Throughout American history, this dream that was responsible, in large measure, for building America, was motivated out of desperation and a passion to succeed. This dream, I believe, is so basic to American existence that it is one of the most cherished and sacredly held values in America. Unfortunately, there are plenty of greedy, unscrupulous opportunistic individuals and organizations that attempt to exploit this sacred American dream by making false promises and selling false hopes, at exorbitantly high prices, to the poorest and most desperate of the American poor.
Long before the faculty at the University of Bridgeport went out of strike, there were indications of questionable practices at the university. UB's willingness to exploit the hopes and dreams of young, vulnerable, and innocent people was reminiscent of the worst practices of many "for profit" proprietary schools that exploited the poorest of the poor in their quest for private profits. Back in the early 1980s, the University of Bridgeport engage in a high glitz ad campaign, taking out full page advertisements in the New York Times and other nationally know newspapers, comparing the education received at the University of Bridgeport to the quality of educational available at Ivy League Universities in the United States. It falsely exaggerated the earning power and career success of its graduates. Although, clearly hubris, false and misleading to the more knowledgeable, to the likes of this young person (at the time) and many like me, these very sophisticated and expensive advertisements were stunningly impressive. The photos and physical description of supposedly the school's campus were equally false and misleading at the time. By looking at the photos used in their advertisement, one was left with the impression that the school was located at a beautiful pristine beach front community that was completely surrounded by a lush forested park.
Little, if anything, of the school's advertising and recruiting literature was remotely close to reality. While I was a student in the early 1980s at the University of Bridgeport, the incident of crime, including violent crime was intolerably high. I was personally attacked three times on, or near the campus by residents from the low income housing projects that surround the perimeter of the school. During my second year at the school, a man was found shot dead about three blocks from the university campus. It was simply not safe to walk on, or near the campus most of the day. The fear was omnipresent. Adding insult to injury, the career marketability and opportunities claimed to exist for graduates of the school by the university was in, large measure, false. The career planning and placement office at the school was a joke and pitiful. I remember frequently walking into the office and finding no staff at all in the office. After completing my first year at the university, reality about my career prospects began to set in. Things really began to get scary. I remember walking down town Bridgeport and a passerby asking me what university I was attending, and me telling him I was a UB student and his dreadful response. He told me that he had graduated from the University of Bridgeport more than a year earlier and was completely unable to find work. This was unfortunately to be an omen in regards to my own future career prospects as a MBA graduate of good academic standings from the University of Bridgeport. I, like many other graduates of UB have graduated to unemployment and perpetual under employment. I had spent years on my career search after graduating from the University of Bridgeport, sending out many hundreds of resumes to no avail. Only after about twenty years was I able to finally pay off my more than $45,000 student loan used to pay for my education at UB. I feel that, as a young innocent and vulnerable person, my American dream was deliberately violated and exploited for the revenue seeking needs of the University of Bridgeport. The school is nothing more than a highly questionable diploma mill.
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