Note for students thinking of applying to Occidental College : just don’t.
tldr at bottom -
So I could spend hours upon hours discussing why Oxy is one of the worst institutions I’ve ever been a part of, but I just want to highlight a few of the things which have made my experience so terrible. I only have a year left, and some of my time was lost due to covid, but I promise you the school is so awful that I actually dramatically preferred my time stuck on zoom. Also a little disclaimer - a lot of the students are incredibly nice and thoughtful, and some of the professors are amazing as well (the History, Critical Theory and Social Justice, and Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture classes were great, although all of my STEM classes were pretty lacking). However, my primary complaints rest in the administration.
- They will fuck you over with tuition payments big time. I attended Occidental mostly because they gave me much better aid than other schools I applied to. However, once the first year passed, they started giving me way less need based aid, only keeping the merit aid consistent since they promise to do that. I tried appealing each year saying that my family could not possibly afford it, but they would decline, claiming we had new income that they refused to elaborate on. We gained no assets and nobody in my household got a raise, yet each year my expected financial contribution went up almost 50% after taking out maximum loans and work study. There is NO explanation or clarification of this from the financial aid office, same as the past few years. I’ve been a part of fundraising efforts at the school in multiple ways over my years there, and I think that since the college is losing money they’re trying to scrape together funds from everyone and dig as deep as they can into students and alumni, rather than considering why people are giving them less money in the first place.
- They try to rip you off in every way possible. For instance, in study abroad, even if the program you’re going to is super inexpensive, you’re still paying Occidental tuition for that semester at your regular rate. They claim that it’s because they do some work for you along the way to help, but for one semester of study abroad I paid almost 20k more than the program cost, and I filled out every visa paper myself, and the one thing they helped me with was incorrect and actually cost me money to fix with the abroad program. They were useless and somehow made tens of thousands off of me for doing absolutely nothing, when everyone else in my program from other schools paid almost nothing in comparison. What they do is NOT the norm and it’s incredible that they keep getting away with it.
- Room & Board process is awful. Room draw is uneven, with some people getting good time slots every year and others getting bad ones for years in a row, and it often appears to be blatantly alphabetical. Most dorms have no AC [in LA] and some have almost no windows as well, so getting stuck in the awful dorm with roommates you don’t want due to a poor room draw time every year is clearly unfair and unideal. In terms of food, the school always seems to boast about how good its food is during tours, yet it has given people food poisoning multiple times (even the freshmen last year during orientation, which they denied and blamed on a local food truck that half the sick kids hadn’t even eaten at). Furthermore, there are often little to no decent vegan/vegetarian options, and instead just use vegetables with no protein and call it equal. Aside from make/pick your own sort of stations, the food is often so bad or bland that nobody finishes. They use local / organic produce though so at least there’s that I guess.
- People are not happy. Out of all of my close friends (maybe 15 people) I can only think of 2 who enjoy the school. Most of the people I know just realized it was horrible too late to transfer, given covid and the fact that online classes didn’t involve dealing with the admin.
- The school does not prepare you for success. Workshops I have attended with the career center have never been helpful and only covered the most basic of information, and half the people at the career fair that I had scheduled talking with over covid never even showed up. I also almost didn’t get my work study job one year because the career center incorrectly filled something out and took forever to fix it. Almost every recent alumni I know that didn’t major in STEM is working in fast food or retail.
- Drug use - this isn’t talked about enough, but most students at Occidental that I know are wasted in some form much more often than people I know from other universities, and are intoxicated throughout the day and classes rather than just nights and parties. RAs smoke weed in between helping students. People secretly do coke in the back of classrooms. Half my friends who never used drugs at the start of college are addicts now, and the college doesn’t do shit to fix the problem at its root (unhappiness and/with campus culture).
- Likely the most awful reason - sexual assault and a dramatic lack of accountability from the school. First week of school, party at a local sports house. Loads of SA reports from girls that attended, citing specific people who were primarily responsible. Nothing is done except telling coaches to talk to their players, some of who did and some of who didn’t. My freshman year a large group of people documented [with evidence] information about how a student had threatened or assaulted them to various degrees, even going so far as the student telling one of the people that he had purchased a gun. Yet somehow, this student didn’t even get expelled and is allowed to re-enroll after the others graduate. A student last year was exposed as saying incredibly racist things (along the lines of ‘a certain race should die’) and again no real admin response. The Title 9 process is incredibly long, complicated, and tedious which leads to dangerous outcomes like this. And if the admin can’t do the bare minimum to protect students, then in my opinion they shouldn’t get enrollment numbers or funding from anyone.
Tldr; Occidental College admin is not supportive of students in any way, leading to unexplained financial aid changes, constantly ripping students off, unfair room selection processes, terrible food, rampant substance abuse and sexual assault that is never properly addressed, and generally unhappy students.