The Savannah College of Art and Design

Date: Jan 03 2007
Major: Design Arts - Industrial Design/Graphic Design/etc (This Major's Salary over time)
I'm a Broadcast design major who's been through quite alot in the 3 years I've been here.

First of all, the classes are great and you'll learn alot in them, but you have to watch out for poor professors who have little/no teaching experience. SCAD has a very high professor turn-over rate and it shows with many professors being new to the college environment.

Outside of the classes though, the college is a mess. The much touted student bus system is average at best. Dorms are over-priced and even more expensive than getting an appartment in the city. The meal plan is bland, poorly cooked, sometimes blantly unhealthy, and highway robbery at nearly $6 a meal. You also won't be able to even use all your meals, because the meal redeption system is arranged so that you're prohibited from eating for certain periods of time and classes are poorly scheduled to allow students a chance to eat.

While the faculty are usually very helpful, the other departments will all treat you like you don't deserve the time of day. Financial aid and the bursar will often give you mis-information or not know what they are even talking about, they also send important information to incorrect addresses fairly often.

The mail system is even more useless, as packages and letters take an extra 2-3 days to go through the college's mail system before they're even available for pick-up, if that. Communication between administration and students is laughable, with an email system that can sometimes take weeks or even months to deliver mail to other addresses within the college's own network.

Computer labs are often crowded or uncomfortable during common working hours and labs are ALWAYS poorly airconditioned.

Security is a joke, as guards are often lax and asleep at their posts when they aren't overly interogating every person who tries to walk by. College security's job is to protect the college's property, not the students. Crime and racial tension are VERY high in Savannah, you need to have at least a little bit of street smarts to avoid the vagrants and gangs that wonder very close to the dorms and campus facilities. College grounds are very safe, but if you're not in sight of a security guard, you're not on college grounds, even walking between adjacent buildings can be dangerous due to the large blind spots.

The education is great and the facilities are there, but your biggest problem at SCAD is always going to be the administration.