Bike shop employee Melissa Irvine takes a look at a student's bike. Photo credit: Katie Walker '10

In addition to fixing bikes, the shop also offers rental bikes.  Nestled in the basement of Wohlford Hall, it remains largely unused by the student body despite the remarkable fact that repairs and rentals are provided free of charge.  Mike Carroll (‘12), an employee at the shop, says that while rentals have been steady since the shop’s opening in late September, traffic is still lagging.

“[There are] four or five people during the afternoons.  Less on the mornings or weekends,” says Carroll, one of several student bike technicians employed by the shop.  The student employees are working through Federal Work Study, which likely accounts for the long hours of the shop.

In an article detailing the release of the shop on the CMC homepage, Dean of Students Jeff Huang hailed the shop as being a breakthrough both in terms of sustainability as well as an alternative for freshmen disallowed from bringing their own cars to campus.  Huang cited the service the shop would provide the school, saying that “Many students bring a bike to campus, but most don’t have an air compressor, or even a hand pump, nor do they have a way to put the bike in a car and take it to a bike shop.”

Many students do a poor job at taking care of their rides, and the bike techs at the shop have worked on numerous bikes with mechanical issues placing the rider at risk.   ”I am consistently surprised to see the condition of some of the bikes that are brought in.  Amazing that they are still able to be ridden,” said Carroll, who rides both competitively and recreationally.

From the language of the article, it would seem the opening of the bike shop was going to hail the advent of a bicycle revolution on campus.  Perhaps part of the shop’s relative lack of patrons is a lack of publicity.  The shop opened in mid-September with little fanfare.  With training provided by Paul Miller, owner of Cycle Werks bike shops in Orange County and father of assistant dean of admissions Adam Miller (‘03), the staff at the CMC bike shop are qualified to handle a variety of repairs.  ”Even if we can’t fix it for you, it’s still good to identify any problem so it can be taken care of sooner rather than later,” says Carroll.  ”There is a bike shop just a short walk down to the Village, with an incredibly friendly and helpful staff.”

Pitzer's Green Bike Program

Nonetheless, the shop is under-utilized.  It’s disappointing to see something that could be a legitimate bonus for the CMCcommunity sit empty for the majority of the day. And those are long days, mind you, with hours from 9 AM- 10 PM on weekdays and 11 AM- 6 PM on weekends.  Why the shop needs to be open well after dark is a bit of a mystery.  Emergency tune-ups perhaps? Maybe its tucked away location and lack of signage are to blame– in contrast, Pitzer’s Green Bike Program is housed next to their student center and has an eye-catching facade.

With this new addition to CMC’s sustainability agenda, perhaps some of the car-less freshmen should consider investing in a two-wheeled form of transportation. In the meantime, at least the CMC student body will have the security of knowing you can get your gears oiled any time of day.

#16 Best Campus Food (+1)
#7 Best Career Services (-5)
#11 Dorms Like Palaces (no change)
#3 Happiest Students (+1)
#15 Lots of Race/Class Interaction (+3)
#11 Most Popular Study Abroad Program (not ranked last year)
#10 Most Politically Active Students (+1)
#13 Professors Get High Marks (not ranked last year)
#10 Most Accessible Professors (+1)
#3 School Runs Like Butter (+2)
#13 Great Financial Aid (-3)
#1 Easiest Campus to Get Around (not ranked last year)
#3 Best Quality of Life (+2)

And lastly, the ranking that CMC Public Affairs left off in their annual self-congratulatory mass e-mail…
Lots of Beer #5 (+8)

You can bet your Icehouse keg that President Gann is getting angry phone calls from alumni and parents about that one.  It’s not surprising that Public Affairs left it out in the e-mail, but it is strange that the e-mail is from “Public Affairs Office,” as if someone (Richard Rodner?) doesn’t want to stand behind it.

Anyway, expect to see some backlash against ASCMC in the form of increased security at parties, RA narc-ing, and difficulty when registering kegs.  In addition, Dean of Students will get some heat, and Trustee committee meetings will dwell on the issue for far too long.  Last year I wrote a post on the topic of beer at CMC, but it goes without saying that this ranking is based on widely-held misconceptions about CMC parties.  (On a side note, Preston Waserman ‘11 thinks we can do better: “I really think with the right attitude we can get to top three,” Waserman said in his most recent Twitter.)

As for the rankings as a whole, they seem to indicate that not only did we drink more, but we admitted three or four more minorities and international students, got rejected from lots of jobs, fired a housing coordinator, and had slightly better weather.  Not a bad year.

Overall, I would say that Princeton Review does a good job of ranking the Claremont Colleges within the Claremont Colleges.  Yes, CMCers might drink more than Pitzer and the other 5Cs, but we’re pretty comparable to Pomona and pale in comparison to most state schools.  And yes, Pitzer has lot more “Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians” who happen to smoke pot than the other 5Cs.  But I wouldn’t say Harvey Mudd is truly among the least beautiful campuses in the country or that CMC’s beer consumption per capita is anywhere close to that of some Ivy League schools.

Here’s how the other 5Cs fared:

Scripps:
#4 Dorms Like Palaces
#4 Most Beautiful Campus
#19 Easiest Campus to Get Around

Pomona:
#14 Dorms Like Palaces
#7 School Runs Like Butter
#5 Great Financial Aid
#13 Least Religious Students
#1 Best Classroom Experience
#19 Best Quality of Life

Pitzer:
#10 Most Popular Study Abroad Program
#12 Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians
#19 Gay Community Accepted
#7 Lots of Race/Class Interaction
#14 Reefer Madness
#11 Least Religious Students
#11 Most Liberal Students

Harvey Mudd:
#7 Least Beautiful Campus
#17 Intercollegiate Sports Unpopular or Nonexistent
#15 Professors Get High Marks
#12 Most Accessible Professors
#18 Students Study the Most

The application process seems to increasingly be just a game of surprise the administrator. Sure you got to have a baseline level of test scores and grades, but in today’s college crazed environment you need to have a hook. With so many kids with great numbers, you can’t just be brilliant intellectually; you need to have had some “wow” type experience. It’d be even better if the experience had an impact on your life so you could write an essay about it.

Of course, the admissions people make it all sound so very reasonable. Who thinks college kids shouldn’t be “well-rounded” and have “balance” in their life? But that’s not actually what they look for, is it? The admissions folk want kids who’ve done something unique and original. Putting your heart and soul into the Politics Club just isn’t the same as going to South America with your church—even if you don’t really care about clean water in Latin America. Even if the only reason you went is to get into college, and the only reason you could go is Daddy’s credit card.

The perverse effect of this is that it rewards people who are driven to get in to the point of toolishness, willing to abandon what they care about for the all-important goal of acceptance into college. As a result, we often get the pretense of having interesting students rather than the reality of having genuinely interesting people. We’ve all met people and thought, “How the hell did you get in here?” Maybe this is just me, but I often wonder how some of the CMCers I meet can be so boring having done such interesting things.

Graduate school and the slew of post-undergrad scholarships/fellowships are no better. You want to study the impact of harmonicas on the assimilation of Australian aborigines into the dominant culture? Here, take a Fulbright. I can just imagine the application committee thinking: “Wait you only saved an African village ravaged by AIDs from starvation? That was so pre-millennium. This girl nursed swine flu victims back to health in Mexico City. Now that’s edgy.” It’s like trying to break a world record; it’s easier if it’s obscure.

This obsession with absurd specialization and uniqueness recapitulates the problem with college admissions: the focus on the symbolic at the expense of the real. It’s not about the merit of what you actually did so much as its perception. New things are exciting. Foreign things are exciting. Playing on the soccer team or pushing yourself in the classroom? Not so much. Doing the latter a lot better doesn’t get you nearly as much as a little bit of the former. Academia is generally pretty awful about this, but it’s gotten particularly bad in the case of college admissions.

So in the case of college admissions, I’d like to propose a solution. Rather than letting people tell us whether they’re well rounded or not, why don’t we actually test it? We could easily have WOA-like trips for finalists over their Winter Break. Think of it as a week long interview. Although I didn’t go on a WOA trip myself, I hear they’re great bonding and character testing experiences. It’s hard to fake being interesting for a whole week. People inevitably let their guard down and show their true selves. We can find out if kids are actually well rounded or if they’ve just been good at faking interest in lots of activities. If we’re serious about getting well-rounded, interesting kids, I think this would go a long way. The current game of formative experience one-upmanship is just that: a game. Maybe its time we stopped forcing kids to play by rules better suited to an application for a Guinness world record than our young’s first entry into academia.

Despite the loan-free financial aid, CMC expects to have a similar yield of students accepting admission, due in part to the more level playing field among elite schools that are now offering loan-free financial aid.  The quality of the students is “a little better,” according to Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Richard Vos.  Median SAT scores went up slightly to 710 for both reading and math scores.  Writing scores are not counted until CMC can study the effects of the scores in current classes.