At the end of last week, it was brought to my attention that an anonymous message had been sent out on Facebook to a potential member of the class of 2016 including the following excerpts:
“1. Your junior and senior year, you will not get university housing. You will be expected to find an apartment on your own. The university does not care about housing and over 70% of just the junior class this year was kicked off campus when told we would have a great chance at housing on campus.
2. If you are coming for forensic science, understand that you are not paying for the value of the education but for the name of the college.
Also, make sure to look at the Retention rate of the University of New Haven, as it is very low.”
It’s really frustrating to me that current/former students are still stuck on “sabotaging” the university, rather than being productive. Another point of frustration is the misinformation in this message. As I mentioned in my last editorial, 1700 people paid the housing deposit on time and were immediately eligible for selection. Out of those 1700, only around 250 people will not fit and will be put on a waitlist. This means that if we estimate that the junior class is 700 people, and that only members of the junior class did not get housing, 35.7% of the class would not have housing, not 70% as stated in the message. The second point is completely ludicrous, but I will say that I believe you get out of your education what you put in, so if you don’t get anything out of your four years of studying forensics, odds are you didn’t do much during them. The last thing mentioned, the retention rate, is just plain wrong. I ventured over to US News online to check out the figures, and it states that, “The average freshman retention rate, an indicator of student satisfaction, is 74.2 percent.”
I get it; there are some folks out there who are none too happy with the University of New Haven. It’s bound to happen to some extent because there’s no way to keep absolutely everyone completely happy. Despite this, it’s a low blow to confuse the potential incoming freshman class with misinformation on Facebook. Perhaps their time could be better spent by finding a nice hobby or accepting that UNH is not or was not the university for them, and they should move on with their lives rather than dwelling in the past.
To end on a bit of a positive note, it was nice to see a handful of current students defend the school, and it was also great to see that when a prospective student saw the post and wasn’t sure what to think, they tagged a bunch of admissions counselors and asked for help clearing things up. Good for you taking the right route and making sure everyone got the facts!
