BY EVAN HENSLEIGH

In print | Published April 22, 2004

This is my last column, and it’s a bit of a digression. It’s not about technology. Something more pressing has come to my attention, a bit closer to home.

We’re nearing the end of another year here at Swarthmore, bringing us all one step closer to graduation (or, in some cases, right up to it). So let’s reflect on the past years for a moment.

Remember that day when you got accepted? A beam of light shone down from the heavens. Angels called out your name. It was a joyous time indeed.

Four years and $160,000 later, you’ll get a Swarthmore diploma to show for all your hard work. That’s right. Four years of work for a piece of paper from a scarcely-heard-of institution. While the admissions office is working on a video to convince prospective students that Swarthmore isn’t as intense as it’s cracked up to be, let’s face it. We go here. We’ve taken the courses. We’ve lived through this place. We know they’re lying.

Every student I’ve encountered who’s ever gone abroad, transferred (to or from) or studied at another college has said the same thing: Swarthmore is harder. Not just a little bit harder; they said that other places are cakewalks in comparison. Consider, for a moment, what your grades might look like if you’d gone to Harvard, where the average GPA is 3.8 and 90 percent of the graduating class receives honors. And yet, Dean Gross admonishes us, “You shouldn’t come out feeling as though Swarthmore is something that’s been done to you.”

Of course, it isn’t. We do it to ourselves. How many people do you know here who are planning to receive “just a major”? It seems as though most everyone is doing pre-med or a minor (roughly comparable achievements), if not a double major — and that’s to say nothing of the honors program. And sports. And extracurriculars. And living wage campaigns.

So, take a moment to consider. You’re paying money to receive more work and lower grades than your fellows at Ivy League colleges. Sure, lower grades are no problem for places that have heard of us. But many positions have a GPA requirement, and if you don’t meet it and they haven’t heard of Swarthmore, they won’t even look at your application. So, grad schools and non-profits, yes; jobs west of D.C., no. Perhaps we should have a formulaic shadow GPA to show potential employers: “This is what my GPA is; this is what my college says my GPA would have been at another college.”

One wonders, then, what the point of the admissions video is. Why are we creating a video designed to convince students Swarthmore isn’t intense, when it clearly is? If we want to limit our reputation for being so hard core, why is our solution to try and spin people into thinking that it isn’t so bad, rather than making it so? Is it to raise admissions yield? This will surely backfire if we attract students who are looking for a less intense atmosphere and transfer away when they realize what they’ve gotten into.

What I think is more alarming is that there’s been no discussion in the community at large over whether this is something we ought to be doing. Shouldn’t we try to increase Swarthmore’s reputation for being intense? If we’re doing this to ourselves, on some level we approve of the workload. Maybe we should be telling the world Swarthmore is hard, hard, hard. If you want to go to college to have fun, go to Harvard. If you want a focused, intense learning experience, come to Swarthmore.

While I certainly agree that Swarthmore gives a first-rate education, perhaps second to none, let’s have some candor. This is not a low-pressure college. Our reputation for being intense is nothing if not deserved, even if we bring it upon ourselves. The admissions office shouldn’t lie to get students to come here. It’s time we had a serious debate about the direction in which our college and its image are being taken_._

Evan Hensleigh is a senior. You can reach him at ehensle1@swarthmore.edu.

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