South Puget Sound Community College — Local services in Olympia

Financial aid office is a joke, been going for 4 years and never received any aid from them. I am also told if more funds become available they will let me know (word to the wise funds will not become available). Fill out all the paperwork and enroll in worker retraining and yup nothing. Parking lot is way to small for the amount of students enrolled in classes. The school just keeps accepting more and more students but doing nothing on the parking situation. A lot of the faculty and school in general is very liberal. Being a stright, conservative, white, male I am looked at like I'm the devil. If you do not play the teachers game your grades will show it. Get marked down because of their beliefs. Do a report on guns and 2nd amendment and your teachers head will explode. The DEC likes to say they are "a place for everyone" which it should be "a place for everyone unless you are a straight, conservative, white, male then GTFO". The security think they are police officers. I can not speak for everyone but old guy with a white beard has a power trip mentality. The lines for the parking stalls are so raided and chipped that in the morning you can not see them at all and this guy is just waiting for you to walk away from your vehicle to write you a ticket. With the extreme lack of parking you get forced to look for parking in their "car pool only" area. This guy will pull up all high and mighty and yell at you for parking in the car pool area. The staff up the hill in the welding and automotive department are great. The atmosphere is 100% different up their. The students legitimately hate to have to go down the hill into any part of the school. The math and writing centers were very helpful I definitely was a big fan on the one on one assistance they offer. All in all I'm glad I received my two 2 year degrees and now get to go out into the work force where I'm not asked my sexual orientation, my gender identity, or how I identify feminine or masculine on a job application. Every quarter you have to bow down to their demographics and answer all those questions like any of it matters when you are enrolling in...

Terrible college. I went here in 2011 and I hated it. Teachers push, push, and push. They give you no time to study the material. When you work 40 hours a week and have 3 classes, they need to not overload you so much that you can't process what needs learned.

My wife began college here Fall 2015. We took out a student loan at the beginning of the quarter. We checked the portal every day for over a month. She went in to find out what was wrong, and no one could give her a straight answer. She called, she went in and after a dozen times she finally found out that the person in charge of loans had a family emergency and couldn't do her job. So then she was told they would be worked on and processed that week. Well, we had to wait over a month from that point to get our funds.

They didn't give us our full amount, so we took out another loan for Winter only. It was a smaller amount and we turned in the paperwork at the beginning of January 2016. We still have nothing and it's the end of February. You talk to 15 different staff members, you get 15 different answers. And the work study students are ignorant and don't know anything at all. They are of no help. You ask them something, even basic, and they tell you to check back tomorrow or something.

My wife had a course that one of her assignments had her meet the professor in person, and it was an online course! Hello, online means no face to face.

Did I mention they try to cram as much cirriculum as possible down your throat? Teachers need to realize students have other responsibilities. This is an issue that many people from this college have mentioned, so I'm not alone in this.

It's a shame this is the only junior college in town. I would avoid this place. Driving half an hour to TCC or Centralia College is a much...

This school is going through a Corporate type of re-structuring as of my enrollment 2016. The problem with corporatizing education is information is not distributed freely, but given on an as needed basis confuses faculty, students, advisors, financial aid and the administration. I did not like how we the students got so much conflicting information. The college hierarchy, which is the board and the VP’s set this up. There are some really good, dedicated teachers and they will prepare you for the University environment as far as study, course assignments and homework in spite of what they think about their leaders. That’s the only good thing I can say about the college. I had one BAD teacher but she's gone now, so stick up for yourself and say something if you get a bad one.

For older students contact instructors prior to taking classes since the best advise comes from them and please have some computer skills because, Canvas, the schools operating system for grading, communication with your teachers and keeping up with assignments has a lot of flaws. The schools failure to communicate within departments causes the confusion within financial aid, advising, faculty, students and the administration. I give the school a low rating because the school functions like a CORPORATION, instead of an institution of learning.

Education may give us the knowledge needed to get a corporate job. But if one gets the corporate politics before having a sound education this can be detrimental. We have enough emotional and mental health issues in the world...