Southern Methodist University — Attraction in University Park

SMU has a beautiful campus, and students here have the opportunity to earn fairly decent jobs. BUT, the school and its administration does not care about it's current students at all. They are entirely focused on the next batch of paying students, while neglecting the needs of the current students. No matter what you do if you end up attending school here, DO NOT listen to the academic advisers. They commonly mislead students into taking additional coursework they do not need in order to extend their time at SMU and earn more money. They also do not offer the classes needed to finish the program you're in each semester, but will not advise you to take them while you can. Instead, they advise you to take other classes. Additionally, the financial office is consistently incompetent, and often "accidentally" charge students with misc fee's, and then make you argue for months to repeal them. The whole point of attending a private school is smaller class sizes and an administration that cares about the individual students. The administration would rather water the grass than hire a decent professor who actually knows what they're talking about (I often have to correct my professors based on what I was taught in the real finance world...

It's the perfect place for preppy, basic, spoiled, upper class kids who are obsessed with Greek life. If you want any kind of open mindedness, diversity, kindness or a sense of community within a university, turn and run as fast as you can. I'm counting down the days until I graduate and I hope you don't make the same mistake I did by choosing to come here. While we do have one of the most beautiful campuses I have ever seen, that alone is not enough to make up for their blatant lack of respect for students. All they care about is getting the next batch of paying students in so they can continue building bigger and better structures to attract more paying customers with no regard to current students or their needs. This self fulfilling cycle of pessimism and greed will drive this school to the ground one day. At...

Summon a list of underrated colleges and universities from anyone who knows about higher education and SMU must be on that list. This is a university with impressive resources, a beautiful campus, a rich and balanced combination of research depth and undergraduate focus, a thriving athletics program, and a strong and loyal alumni base. This university deserves more attention than it currently receives, maybe because it is enormously expensive and also Methodist conservative. That leads to a certain amount of self selection of applicants. As far as academic quality goes, that's not an issue, and the students are quite talented. Also, Dallas isn't the most exciting college town, but it is a very large city with all the perks you would expect of a city this large. The surrounding neighborhood is affluent and...