It's kinda like congratulating someone on being the first woman serial killer. It's not an accomplishment worth admiring.
The Citadel is still pretty much a bunch of idiots who play at being soldiers. It's not a college, it's LARP West Point with high school level class work. And it's *always attracted the detritus of Southern culture.
I respect your average community College a he'll of a lot more than Citadel grads. At least the CC folks wanted to go there and paid for it themselves.
Again, the Citadel academically is no different than Wintrop or Clemson or the University of South Carolina. It's just another state school. Students who go there don't get a free ride because of the military focus. Tuition is about average for state schools, and a good bit higher than community colleges in South Carolina. Students go there because they want to, and other than scholarships or ROTC, they pay for it themselves.
Though as a graduate of a rival school, I'm not going to challenge your characterization of their students and graduates.
That like saying "oh Boston Community College is no different than MIT" because they are both universities.
It's not "just another state school". It's a high school play acting as a college. The level of class work is abysmally poor, and the students show it.
They pay for the connections to the other Lost Cause KKK wannabes. That's the "attraction". It's certainly not the academics.
And notice that it's Mommy & Daddy paying to go to The Citadel. Not the students. Which is very much unlike Communjty Colleges.
Clemson, the University of South Carolina, The Citadel, and Winthrop are all state funded, state supported, public colleges in South Carolina. The former two are research institutions, and the latter two are four year universities but not research institutions so yeah, you got me. But the Citadel has real degree programs in things like physics, chemistry, the humanities, and engineering. Their engineering programs are supposed to be quite good.
And if you think Mommy & Daddy aren't paying for their kids at Clemson, you've never been to South Carolina.
Who cares where they get their funding or if they're state schools? That's completely irrelevant to the discussion.
The point is that the academics are shit. Litetally no one hires a Citadel for any serious work - because the quality of their graduates is bargain basement. A Citadel Engineering degree will get you hired at McDonald's. Their graduates get placed with other Citadel alum companies and in positions where their complete lack of competence isn't a drag on the firm.
In anything serious, it's on a level with Phoenix University. Both are accredited schools. But neither produce anything like folks you'd hire.
You know where the vast majority of the Engineering grads from The Citadel go? The US military. Where that degree is almost completely pointless as they teach you explicitly what the military needs which has very little to do with anything else.
And the relevance of who funded them is in my original post: I respect people who self funded going through Community Colleges (which have similar or better academics) than I do to The Citadel, where admission is heavily alumni (i.e legacy) driven and solely paid for by parents.
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u/SirIAmAlwaysHere 2d ago
It's kinda like congratulating someone on being the first woman serial killer. It's not an accomplishment worth admiring.
The Citadel is still pretty much a bunch of idiots who play at being soldiers. It's not a college, it's LARP West Point with high school level class work. And it's *always attracted the detritus of Southern culture.
I respect your average community College a he'll of a lot more than Citadel grads. At least the CC folks wanted to go there and paid for it themselves.