Tolerable for Part-time or Filler Work. Bad for Your Career. Bad for Your Soul. - Anonymous employee Hope College Employee Review

1.0
10 Oct 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good School with a few really top notch professors in their fields. If you want part-time work or call-in as needed work, this can be a decent place, especially if you don't have a lot of training in a particular field of work or are not overly committed to professional development or establishing a career. If you value that kind of flexibility over compensation and benefits too, this could be a tolerable work environment for you. For faculty, there are are also some decent protections that can give most tenured faculty a sense of job security, but tenure is not as secure here as it is in many other places, and I have seen a number of tenured faculty let go over recent years.

Cons

Pay is generally about 20% less here than industry standards. Very weak leadership. Poorly managed. Very political with a very unstructured bureaucracy. This environment results in a lot of turn-over and instability for professional and full-time staff. It is very hard to tell which faction is setting the bar/priority at any point in time, and there are very poorly developed processes for handling work flow, priority status projects, disagreements or decision-making across factions. What results, is a very unstable work environment, where standards and basis of staff assessments are always in flux. What earned you a gold star one day can threaten your job the next. If you are a low or mid-level manager, a lot of time is wasted on trying to insulate your team from the next squabble or turf-war between departments/divisions. I've seen this result in the burn-out and loss of several good managers. At the department/division level, a lot of effort is wasted on keeping other departments in check so as to prevent them from "getting ahead" in some way. In part due to this, and in part due to an extremely frugal work culture, professional development is non-existent; many systems, webpages, and hardware are rather outdated too (by a couple of decades in many cases). It also creates an environment where accountability and transparency can not thrive, and those who advocate for it or attempt to practice it in dealing with other divisions and with higher level management , will only make themselves or their teams a target. Bottom-line, if you are a decent manager, care about your work, are seeking professional development opportunities or looking for a career, this is not a good place for you. You will only become a target by someone or grow frustrated by all the inaction and squabbling.

Explore other reviews about Hope College

5.0
5 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Educational environment with access to far more involved opportunities than typically available at similar institutions.

Cons

Opportunity is highly dependent on what professor you do research under.

5.0
2 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Excellent culture and support from administration and faculty

Cons

None that stand out to me

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