Your thoughts on this university program (degree, costs, school, master's)

[artsyguy]

Let's say a graduate program advertised that it was good and ranked somewhat well in the prior years, no current ranking is available for the past 2 years which appears suspicious, but comes from a well-known university.

So, you make a huge effort to move there and find out the culture in the program is oppressive, offers poor quality communication from faculty and staff, half of the classes deviate too much from the actual major or are boring, are told by some faculty or staff that the degree isn't "that good anyways" (contradictory messages), and the classmates in general seem to be hostile and OCD.

Is that what is normal for graduate school atmosphere? or is this just "bait and switch advertising?" crazy/greedy people taking advantage of young people with money or loans? Once they have you committed to the program they think they can just suck the money out of you and not give you your monies worth, since they assume you are not going to get up and leave.

Or is all that part of a high quality "learning" experience?

[Kaye02]

That doesn't sound normal to me at all. There are quite a few quirky people in academia but, in my experience, most people aren't hostile. And, when even the teachers say the program is useless, that is a huge warning sign imo. Is there any way you can transfer to a different school?

[swampwolf]

I would complain like all heck.

I don't think you'd get far in trying to recover your losses. Higher education is definitely a buyer beware kind of transaction. But if it's as bad as you make it sound, I would camp in the president's office until I got some kind of sensible solution for getting out with as little damage as possible.

The College of Education in my graduate school had problems similar to some of what you describe, but it was so big you just learned to navigate around the really bad professors and courses.

Of course back then there was not as much money at stake. My whole Master's degree cost less than one graduate level course costs now. You almost couldn't afford not to go to school as long as possible.

[Jeromeville]

It doesn't take much for a graduate program to "go south" when key faculty depart (or are pushed out). My local university had a rather respected grad program in creative writing that devolved into nasty spats between students and professors until the program sort of became an embarrassment. A lot of childishness and egos on display, to the point where you just wanted to slap these folks to get them out of their little self-centered hothouse drama.

As the saying goes... "the reason why things get so bad in graduate school is because the stakes are so low..."