“Born This Way” is not the greatest album of the decade, as its creator Lady Gaga promised prior to its recent debut. In fact, it is only so-so, according to a national sampling of college newspaper reviews.

Summing up the general tenor of most student reviews, Erik van Rheenen at Syracuse University’s The Daily Orange suggests changing the album title to “Born Just OK.” He deems the lazy writing, strange forays into foreign-language singing, and “overblown electric effect[s]” as contributors to an overall “disappointment of epic proportions.”

As van Rheenen writes, “Most songs on ‘Born This Way’ are so chock-full of bells and whistles that it comes across as an album for the crowd who suffer from musical attention deficit disorder.”

Jill Disis, editor in chief of The Daily Illini, is not much kinder. An admitted Gaga fan, she writes that she cannot bring herself to hate the album. But she still calls it — and the marketing campaign hyping it — cheesy, gratuitous, schizophrenic and self-indulgent.

In a piece earlier this week, Disis confesses, “[N]o matter how many tracks impress me now, the album still fails to touch the level of tightness and coherency that ‘The Fame’ and ‘The Fame Monster’ achieved. ‘Born This Way’ could never have been the album of a generation. It was just too ‘big’ to succeed.”

Kelly Ardis at The Oregon Daily Emerald also feels the album is a step back for Gaga as an artist that “threatens to alienate some of her beloved Little Monsters.” As she writes, “[S]traying from the more complex and interesting songs of her previous albums, she reverts to songs that follow a similar pattern and aim for the same dance club demographic.”

Ardis is particularly critical of Gaga’s over-the-top dropping of her own name into numerous songs and her “new habit of weird speak-singing.”

Meanwhile, in his review for The Daily Trojan at the University of Southern California, Louis Lucero speaks to the album’s scattershot nature. “Lyrically, the album vacillates between nonsensical dance anthems (‘Scheibe’) and message-driven pop (‘Born This Way’), but fails to find a happy medium,” Lucero writes. “Never before has the singer ventured so far into preachiness or ridiculousness, and the boldness does nothing to strengthen the album.”

A vocal minority of students do write boldly in support of Gaga’s latest effort. For example, Vanessa Spates of The Lantern at Ohio State University, says the album was “born to succeed.”

In her words, “Some songs can be preachy and others extremely juvenile, but the album as a whole flows together in a cohesive stream. . . . If someone prefers peppy, party songs about getting drunk and dancing in a club they might want to look elsewhere. This album is a different kind of poison.”

Separately, Erin Donaldson at The Daily Californian boasts that the album “blows ‘The Fame’ out of the water. ‘Born This Way’ is exactly what fans should expect from their meat dress-wearing, alien baby-rearing Mother Monster: a quirky, creepy and slightly pretentious collection of good pop music.”

Yet ultimately, it is the sarcastic take of Enjolie Esteve in The Nevada Sagebrush that sums up the overarching sentiment of college newspaper reviews. “Gaga’s annoying, self-proclaimed ‘Little Monsters’ are reduced to mascara and glitter-filled tears by her ‘creativity’ and ‘inspiring originality,’” Esteve writes. “I too am brought to tears when I think of Lady Gaga — tears of laughter.”

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