Bentley College Waltham MA Review

Bentley College is a private university in Waltham, Massachusetts with over 4,000 undergraduate students and over 1,500 graduate students. Waltham is less than 10 miles from Boston and considered a suburb.

” Bentley College has been ranked among the top 50 undergraduate business programs in the nation in BusinessWeek's first ever rankings of the Top 50 Undergraduate Business Schools.” This was a huge coup for Bentley. (www.bentley.com)

Although some of Bentley’s graduates do graduate with other than business degrees, this is not something I would recommend unless your child gets a full tuition waiver. Bentley is a business college.

In fact Bentley was one of the first colleges in the U.S. to require students to have personal computers.

Bentley’s campus is a 100-acre compact campus. It is considered a small campus, one, which is easily navigated on foot. Visit to Bentley is a jaw dripping experience. The campus is gorgeous. It gets pretty and prettier every year as more renovations are done to buildings and buildings are added.

The buildings all share the red brick motif. The main buildings are on a hilltop with a beautiful view of the foliage season, snow, and Boston in the distance. The campus was first built in the mid 60’s. Bentley’s buildings have all the cutting edge and high tech support necessary for a business college including a trading room that mirrors what investment companies use to buy and sell securities.

Waltham has all the suburban amenities of supermarkets, restaurants, and drugstores. Public transportation is very limited. There is a city bus service, which runs very infrequently. The school provides regular shuttle service to Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA. Harvard Square is a very popular destination and from there you can get to Boston and surrounding areas on Boston’s excellent transit system.

Cars are very popular and it is more the norm to have one, but it isn’t a necessity as you can see from the above paragraph. There are complaints about the distance of on-campus parking but the flip side of that is that parking is free and there is plenty of it.

Unlike many other schools the majority of Bentley students live on campus for all 4 years. First-year dorms are the least desirable on campus because they are the older ones. Bentley has a lottery system and the more senior students choose campus apartments leaving older dorms to first year students who tend to be housed together in the Trees, so called because of their names: Cedar, Oak, etc. They provide very simple boxy rooms, which on occasion have turned doubles into triples when there has been an influx of students.

Greek life is a dominant role in campus social life but Bentley does not have its own fraternity or sorority houses. If your child has not made friends, joining a sorority or fraternity is definitely a positive experience, in my opinions.

Class size varies. A writing intensive class is small, about 20-25 students. That would be a class such as, Introduction to Business with a concentration on writing. There are about 30-35 students for other classes.

Bentley’s professors pride themselves on their availability. Both virtual and in-person office hours are strongly enforced. You could find yourself in an on-line discussion group with the professor or in constant contact via e-mail. Professors have scheduled office hours and give extra time for review sessions, for example. Part of the persona of Bentley is to be student focused.

How do I know so much about Bentley and why do I think so highly of it? Beyond its statistics which speak for itself (Your child is unlikely to be selling French fries upon graduation! Starting salaries for Bentley graduates are impressive!), my daughter attended a summer class at Bentley and my stepson graduated from Bentley College.

Jo's Viewpoint

I like it!