The University of Calgary (Canada)

Date: Jun 23 2011
Major: Urban Planning (This Major's Salary over time)
The Urban Studies program has only one tenured professor, and he teaches one or two courses a year. I had him in intro to cities. The rest of the instruction, including your senior level seminar course, will come from sessionals which is a common practice in the entire university. So if you're thinking grad school and want a good reference letter from a good referee, choose your courses accordingly.

Like Calgary itself, this entire university is all about the paper chase. The former president was one of the top paid executives in all of Canada's private sector (yes, top 25 of all CEOs) even though little was done for undergrads. Grants to this university go solely into Engineering or Business. So ENGG and Business students act accordingly. The strongest clubs are amongst Business students putting on events for molson or some other event trying to sell you something as a front for one of the telcos or banks. The student bar is fun if you're in first year, but things for grownups are not nearby unless you take the lrt (or drive) into town.

This university doesn't care about students that will not directly contribute to the oil industry. Undergrads at all levels of the social sciences, humanities, fine arts, etc are contemptuously neglected. While the roof in the main floor social science tower has been leaking for nearly a decade, money is getting dropped on awful looking new buildings for the geosciences.

Students here are apathetic and are either ignorant or apathetic towards the deteriorating quality of education. The only party on campus is 'Bermuda Shorts Day' which is less of a day to drink some beers at the end of the academic year and more like a highly regulated, fenced in prison environment of drinking shit beer sold by the "students union" which occurs at the end of april (when it normally snows) that must end by 2pm. I was an elected faculty rep at the students "union" for a year and witnessing the cronyism first hand from the UC administration and the complacency amongst fellow "union" reps made me hate this school even more. I wish I went to school in the USA where they take the social sciences more seriously than here, up north.