There are really not enough bad things that can be said about DeVry. One of my biggest mistakes was enrolling in this school. First let me give a little history about me & DeVry. I attended DeVry - Columbus, OH from July 1998 to February 1999. I then transferred to DeVry - Pomona, CA and attended there from March 1999 to June 1999. I had a choice of universities to attend but I chose DeVry. It's been quite a bad experience attending this school and this text will cover the reasons why this school is terrible in detail. In short, you should not by any means attend DeVry if you have taken at least a Trigonometry course in high school. The main goal of this text is to prevent any real college bound students from falling victim to this tyranny. DeVry is not anywhere near comparable to a traditional university. The sorry education it gives you is nothing like a real college education. It is far below the standards of even my high school. This is not campus specific, it applies for all DeVry's. Please note that DeVry Inc. is a business, not a university. The primary concern of DeVry is not to give a good education, but to make money. Calling DeVry a school of any sort is inaccurate, DeVry actually gives itself a more adequate name, it is an "institution", an institution from hell to be more accurate.
Getting In (Brainwashing)
It all seemed a bit strange before even starting the school. What DeVry does is send out "recruiters" to get students to join. Unlike normal universities
where you usually have to give a certain amount of effort to get in, they basically beg you to join. I'm sure everyone in their high school has had a day off
from a certain class for a DeVry representative to talk about DeVry. At this point one of these "recruiters" will come in and feed you tons of bullshit about
why DeVry is so good. First of all, what real colleges do anything like this? Sure colleges have representatives at the guidance office once or twice a year
and YOU have to sign up and make the appointment to see them. But DeVry sends out a "recruiter" which is really a salesman to each high school to try to get
students. In my instance the "recruiter", which is officially called a "DeVry representative" showed us a video. The video did kind of make you excited about
DeVry, that's what it's meant to do after all. What's instantly noticeable is how little footage they show of DeVry schools campuses. They some footage of
people interacting with professors and "learning" things, which is obviously acted for the video. Most of the footage they show however is the stuff to get you
excited - Industry companies talking about what kind of people they are looking for, and how technology is shaping the world, and cutting edge people are
needed, etc... In the video that I was presented they had people from Silicon Graphics, Intel, and Netscape among others talking. This is obviously a bit
exciting for anyone that is into computers. Notice however, which I thought was weird, but unfortunately I quickly dismissed it, the fact that almost NONE of
the companies talking about the future and technology even mention DeVry. I know that Netscape never mentioned it, nor Intel. After the video is shown the
recruiter will speak a bit on where the campus is, how it is better then traditional college, how you can really get a job out of there, the 99% job hire rate
they have after graduation, etc. At the end of your wasted class period they hand out a card to fill out to everybody. They gather your name, age, hobbies,
address, phone #, interests, etc. And then they have a checkbox to check if you are interested in hearing more about DeVry. I said what the hell and checked
it. A few days later among the hundreds of college mails I got in my Sr. year of high school, there was one from DeVry, which right there and then included a
Mini-application (I believe it was called). I put it on my pile of possible schools to attend.
As I applied to my three schools of choice I filled out the DeVry mini-application. Once you send this out, a few days later you get a phone call. If you show interest in DeVry by sending in the mini-application, then they will call you and make an appointment with you for an "interview" session. I thought this was extremely weird but "whatever" right? The phone call is from the actual recruiter himself who visited your school. The DeVry method works very similarly to the military. I was told on the phone to be prepared to answer some questions as this interview with the recruiter basically determined if i got accepted or not. Wow, the decision of your acceptance rides on one person huh? So the appointment was made, and the recruiter was at my door within a week or so at about 8pm. Along with him he brought a "buddy" of his to help with the evaluation. So the "interview" begun. He pulled out this huge binder that sits as a triangle on a table with pages to flip through as the interview goes along. I was quite shocked and a bit offended when he opened it and he first asked me to read a sentence. "An education at DeVry is a key essential to a higher degree of success." I read. "Good" he said, "I had no lack of confidence that you could read that sentence, it's just policy for me to ask, because some interviews end right there!" What should have happened perhaps is that I should have asked him to leave at that point. However I let him go on and he asked me what I want for my future, what I want to do, why I think DeVry would be good for me, etc. I felt I had to make animated answers up for this to please him as the whole thing was a bit fake. When asked what I wanted to do I told him I wanted to go into programming in the field of graphics and possibly making video games. He chuckled to himself and drew a box on a piece of paper. He then drew a smaller box within this piece of paper and said that if I would focus on just that type of future, I would be limited to a very small number of jobs, that being the small box. At DeVry they teach a lot of computer and programming skills, allowing for me to be marketable to many jobs, representing the larger encompassing box. I asked what kind of classes they have on programming, particularly with graphics, advanced concepts, etc. He showed me the curriculum list. The curriculum list is set in stone and is something you must follow. You don't get to choose which classes you want to take. You must follow what they say. There were a number of computer languages on the curriculum for CIS, which is what I would be going for, including COBOL, C/C++, Visual BASIC, Object Oriented programming, etc. There was also a Unix course or two in there which were appealing(not that I already didn't know the OS). He said that what I wanted to learn was in the Object Oriented area and that the C++ program will cover the advance topics graphical type topics that I was after but also teach me much more different types of things that would make me marketable towards many things(the bigger box). My parents liked this a lot, and I just thought it was ok, but my heart was already set on what I wanted to do so none of those "other potential jobs" mattered to me.
He then went on about more things. I did like the fact that the program was only three years, the same type of diploma you get at other colleges, which was quite stressed, and that I wouldn't have to deal with other courses which were not of any interest to me such as chemistry, biology, all additional stuff that I had grown to detest by the end of high school. There was no sports team at DeVry which I liked because I was never into any sports personally(besides un-official basketball), and was terribly sick of my sorry home town's reliance/excitement/thriving/living off the high school football season, because that was everything, without that I think most of the town would commit suicide. The price was also affordable, while still not very cheap. Either way by the end of the interview he had me brainwashed quite well as his colleague sat in our living room doing nothing. He asked me for proof of my SAT scores. My father retrieved it from his important school documents file and showed it to him. The colleague had joined us at this point. I got quite a bit of applaud and praise for my not so great 1100 SAT score. They even congratulated my parents as if they had bread some sort of super genius if I'm not mistaken(WOW). Either way they said I was accepted right there and then, gave me a pen as a reward(hahah, which was really low quality by the way), and advanced onto further issues of next contact, and how payment exactly works, what's next in "the process" etc. I had received notice later that I was also accepted by Bloom University(a school close to my hometown) and to Penn State. I had by that time decided on DeVry because they already had me brainwashed, I didn't want to take those courses not relating to my major, I would be out and at a job while my other friends were still in college, and there were many campuses, so a transfer to a west coast campus would be possible in the future as I really wanted to get out of the area(I originally wanted to attend a California university(as that is where all the computer technology and awesome universities are) but that was kind of out of the question for my parents). Oh well, DeVry still seemed to offer the kind of education and direction I wanted. DeVry, here I come!
Welcome To DeVry (Welcome To Hell)
The first time I saw the building I thought it was rather shitty. Yes, I did take a campus tour before actually going out there to school, but I was still
brainwashed that it would be good because I thought hey, they only teach your major, and have no sports so it's obviously going to be a smaller campus. The
building looks like crap incase you haven't seen it. I'm referring to the Columbus, Ohio campus of course. It's this one level, crap hole. And they have
additional class rooms outside of the main building in these very low quality temporary buildings where it feels like the floor could go at any minute. I
recall when my parents took me there for the beginning of college and I looked as we passed it on the highway before taking the exit my father said "There's
your DeVry!!", and I looked at it and had a bit of fear and discomfort just from the sight of this crappy building. This was also heavily influenced by my
slight fear of the unknown of how everything would be living away from home for the first time. When you arrive on "registration day", you are sent through
this 8 hour process of filling out paper work from station to station around the building, it's ridiculous. You are essentially being processed like robots
here, which is what they treat you like at this school - robots that dispense money. After you are through financial aid and the cashier, which makes sure you
have your money ready, among many other stops, your final stop is the bookstore. The book store is ridiculous. Normally you'd expect a higher education
facility to have a nice lavish bookstore that most colleges & universities do. The DeVry Columbus book store can be most accurately described as a rat hole.
It is literally nothing more then a hole in the wall with metal counters and shelves of books behind the cash register. There is no inside to it, you just get
your books from the hallway by giving money to these people on the other side of the hole. When it is closed it looks best, like a hole in the wall that is
patched with metal. I'll never forget the books I got for my first semester. These were absolute idiot books. Introduction to Windows 95, with three other
introduction books for MS-Office programs, an introductory psychology book, and an elementary algebra book. WOW, and all this cost about $400. I thought it
was also funny how the electronics students with their books got a toolbox, and 1 1.44MB floppy disk. Unreal. It pisses me off to think that $400 was wasted
on these books which were never even really used because I knew everything they had contained already, aside from the psychology book.
Getting The Least For Your Money
I would like to discuss at this point how the DeVry bookstore stretches their profits. When you pay your $400 or so and get your books for the semester, they
first of all inflate the price by about a hundred dollars on each of these books. At the end of the semester, you do have the option of selling back your books
to the bookstore(which I'm sure they weren't happy about doing but students were probably pissed off if they didn't have this feature before). If you sell back
all your $400 in books, untouched, you will get about a whopping $40 back. Not only do they keep 90% of what you gave them for something that is returned in
unused condition, but usually they won't even accept the books back, even if they are unused. DeVry has this strategy (one of the many they have to make more
money), to change the book that is used for a course almost every semester. This is obviously absolutely not necessary as such core concepts such as Elementary
Algebra which has been virtually the same since the early part of the century do not change every three months. So this way when they change the book for the
course, they can easily say "No, sorry we can't take that book back because it's not the same book for next semester's course." Assholes. And many professors
do not agree to this either. A good ridiculous example of this is my COBOL teacher, who used a book from about 3 semesters back to teach us the material and
told us that the books we had are not as good and not really bother with them. Every day he went on through the pages of his book, and nobody in the class
could follow the same examples because of DeVry's greed.
After getting my books my father looked at them and said "I hope it's going to get harder", I said "Me too..". We both hoped that this was just for the first semester to really get everyone started from the beginning and make sure no simple concepts were missed. My parents then dropped me off at my DeVry housing place and we said our goodbyes. DeVry housing is of course another opportunity for DeVry to make money off of you. Me and my four room-mate's had an apartment, 3 bedroom. It was basically located in an upcoming ghetto. It was 15 miles away from campus as well. How ridiculous is that. DeVry of course tries to find the cheapest possible housing not caring too much about how crappy it is as long as the complex will agree to their terms, which are that DeVry will pay the complex X amount each month for X students and they will be responsible for everything. The big money-maker in housing is this: For only our apartment, it cost us four living there $1200 together a month for the place. After a month living there we found out from the leasing office that they same 3 bedroom setup with furnishing only costs $800/month. They make $300 per 4 students just of housing. They only make this money off unknowing first semester students though, after the first semester everybody sees whats going on and moves into normal apartments and can pay lower rent for better accommodations. And it's not like they provide the transportation to the college either, you either have to drive yourself, find a ride, or ride a city bus. If you choose to ride a city bus, then you have to be up at 4am to make it to an 8am class on time. DeVry does furnish the places, but just averagely. They did not even provide any desks in any of the rooms of the house at all for their "students".
A Higher Degree Of Stupidity
Soon the actual classes had begun. My professors for the first semester were luckily not too stupid. Most of the students were ridiculously stupid however.
Some not even knowing how to type. Please explain to me why you would take a CIS course if you can't even type!??? You don't go for a degree in something that
you never had any prior interest in dumb asses! That's what I wanted to say to 3/4ths of the class. It's funny how DeVry prides itself on the fact that only
1/10th of the students who begin the program will graduate; Making it sound like the course is so difficult and challenging, where in reality it's the students
who figure out that the "institution" is about bullshit and they're education is bullshit, or they actually are too stupid to pass these simple courses, because
I've seen a lot of stupid people in DeVry. Hah, the chapter on DOS was hilarious in the first semester. Everyone was lost, crying, and ready to quit when
trying to do simple things like change directories, or create a batch file. Once again I must re-iterate the question of why these people are trying for a
degree in CIS when they never even have sat behind a computer. Hahah particularly humorous was when people were racing to copy four line batch files on to
their diskettes from the few people that knew how to do them to pass the test. Well, it's not really humorous, it's quite sad. In a DeVry lab you will find
many "students" checking their hotmail through a Netscape window that is not maximized, but only half of the screen, only because the window is set like that by
default and the "students" don't realize they can change it. There were even some people going to DeVry that were blatant and obviously gangstas, and plenty
that used to be gangstas. The Columbus Ohio campus also has this ridiculously low amount of girls in it. It's like 15 guys for every 1 girl, quite literally.
While I had lucked out in getting some somewhat knowledgeable teachers in the first semester (not all of them), this ended in the second semester when I got
some of the more average DeVry teachers.
DeVry "professors" if you want to call them that are for the most part idiots themselves. Now I would not like to offend all of the DeVry teaching staff, some of them actually know what they are doing and shouldn't even be at this institution, but I think it's safe to say that 75% of the teachers are unacceptable. Most of the teachers at DeVry take a course in some graduate school one semester, then the next semester they are teaching it. A good example of this was my Quantative Methods(Business Math) teacher. He was very lame. He openly admitted(and somewhat proudly to add) how he had just taken the course he was teaching a few semesters back at some other school. In my opinion, any college math teacher should have a significantly comprehensive knowledge of mathematics, most of the mathematics taught at that school. A mathematics teacher should be multi-versed, a trigonometry teacher should obviously also have decent knowledge of geometry, physics, calculus and the such. This business math teacher I know knew nothing more then what he was teaching. I recall days when he would spend upwards of ten minutes talking about how to input a business formula into a four function calculator with a memory save button on it, which numbers to remember, which to store in memory, and when to recall them. Meanwhile I'm sitting in the back of the classroom and in two minutes of that time have a formula written on my TI-85 to solve the calculation by just asking for the variables. WOW, the most disappointing/scary thing was when someone asked him a question about something and I was at the front of the room to ask him if he had one of my papers and he asked to see my calculator to help the other student with the problem. He was so confused and puzzled by the TI-85, looked as though he was staring at an alien, and didn't know what to do with it so he handed it back to me and asked the student to go get his four-function. These stories of professors are really endless. I have had a Visual Basic professor who could barely type, and a COBOL professor who couldn't figure out how to open a file. I kid you not, he sat there for five minutes trying to figure out how to open the COBOL file he had just saved, searching in the default desktop folder that that the open file had thrown him in. When he finally managed to figure out how to get to the right folder where he saved the file(which I think was just by luck in the end), he couldn't figure out why he couldn't see it for another five minutes because he had the files to show set to only .txt or .exe files or something like that. Really ridiculous. I mean when he would close a COBOL program he had just written and it would ask him if he wanted to save the program upon quitting, he would have to stop what he was saying to the class, and analyze the six word "Would you like to save blah.cbl" yes/no dialog box, reading it carefully multiple times for about a minute before finally saying yes and then being confused as to why the program didn't exit. ARrrghhh!! This is not a joke or exaggerated one bit, it's 100% true. In addition the "professors" do not even follow their own word. I had a few professors who said that if you miss this particular test, there is no make up, you cannot make it up, no excuses are valid. There were of course students who missed it and guess what, they still got to take the tests. I thought it was funny during one of the finals the professor said, "we will wait another five minutes for any arrivals, and beyond that point nobody that enters will be able to take the test, they will be excused from the class and the final." The five minutes passed, a couple people showed up within that time, then the teacher announced "OK, from now on the test is being passed out, anyone that is not here now will be excused from the final, asked to leave, there will be no make up." Ten minutes later somebody slips through the door. The professor looks at him with a disappointed face, then goes back, gives him a test, whispers some words in his ear, and has once again gone back on his word. Another student came in a few minutes later who got the same treatment. There were even a couple students who took make ups for the final when there weren't supposed to be any. It is certainly not difficult to manipulate and outsmart most of the "professors" at DeVry to get what you want.
Perhaps one of the most depressing things once you are attending DeVry is realizing the good amount of lying they do about things that are important. They claim a 99%-100% job placement. This is not where the lie is. However they do not tell you about how many people end up getting laid off from their job within a few months. I have heard about this from many other students. "Sure they'll hire you, but after about 4 months they decide if you are up to par, and that's when a lot of them get fired." one person told me. When I looked at the bulletin board of employers who hired for the last few semesters I saw no trace of IBM, Netscape, Intel, or any of the corporations shown in the promotional video. Instead I only saw a few local banks, some dry cleaning company, and similar places. This was quite depressing. Basically they were all local Columbus jobs and they were very dead-end. You would be spending your time maintaining databases basically. We were told many many times at DeVry that our first jobs will be going through other people's COBOL code and changing it. This sounded pretty bad. Instead of working on creating something new, you were stuck going over someone else's work. One of the most appalling instances I've had at DeVry was in my COBOL class. My professor, the same one who couldn't open a file, was telling us about programming. And I swear to god he literally said "Programming is copy work", which he then repeated as "Programming is copying." I could not believe what I had just heard. The most inaccurate remark about programming ever made. I mean sure you sometimes dig into other people's source to learn how to do something, but programming is far from copy work. I was so appalled and pissed off at what I just heard I was questioning if it really happened. Then he repeated it again, and again! "Programming is copy work, programming is copy work, you must understand this, programming is copy work!" Emphasizing it more and more as he went along. There was very little holding me back from getting up, knocking him out, and leaving the building forever.
Soon into this second semester I realized that I'd better get out of DeVry before any more money & time gets wasted. The second semester had been a kind of test of mine to see if things got better or not. If they did, I might stay, if not, then I wouldn't. Things only got worst, so my decision was made. I came up however with a scheme in which DeVry could actually aid me into my future. Since I still wanted to go to a real college, and still thought a California University would be best for me, I decided to inform DeVry that I was simply transferring to their Pomona, California campus. Sure it was an extra waste of money, which still pisses me off to this day. But was the easiest transition to this side of the country, as I didn't know anybody here, so I wouldn't know where to go, where to get an Apartment, job, etc. If I transferred to the Pomona DeVry, they would set me up with housing, and I would drop out, or rather I prefer to say "drop them", and figure out where to get a job/live until I would find a University that I would really like. Of course this meant that I would have to serve some time in the Pomona DeVry. Things were not much different there. Same stupidity, same business. The Pomona campus actually has a separate building known as the 901 building which is blatantly the business part. You go there to figure out your financial aid, how much you owe them etc.
So I arrived at the Pomona campus and found out where I was staying. The apartment complex was actually pretty good, however there were actually only supposed to be three students living in the apartment I was assigned to, and I was the fourth. This apartment is no way designed for four people to live in. It is two bedrooms, but one of the bedrooms is much smaller then a campus dorm room, aka it's a bedroom for one person. Instead of opening a new apartment or something like that, DeVry decided to just put the new students in with the old ones to save money(surprise surprise). Not only that, but it there was no bed for me in the apartment. DeVry had come up with this plan of throwing new students in with ones that were already living as 3 people in apartments, and didn't even set up accommodations. What a bunch of assholes. So I had to sleep on the couch for a full week until they finally sent a bed(which of course I had to construct). In addition to this I was told that they weren't sure if I was going to be staying in that apartment. Housing said that they might move me out to another apartment if some students don't show up. By this they mean if some students decide to leave housing without notifying them and they find an empty spot in an apartment, then they would move me there. So I could not unpack the stuff out of my car for about another week. I was so pissed off. Finally they told me that I would "probably" be staying there so I should unpack my stuff.
I'd have to say it's even worst in Pomona education wise then in Columbus. And the students there are probably even worse. I tried to setup my email when I got there. You know the standard @pom.devry.edu email that every student gets. In Columbus you get @devrycols.edu which functions well surprisingly. However as i tried to set it up in Pomona, I could not get it to work outside of the building. It would only work on an ancient email program they had. So I asked one of the "lab support" people who are to know everything about the local email. Of course they had no idea what I was talking about. "What is the smtp server for the DeVry email?" I asked. I only got a very puzzled look from an almost graduated lab support technician. So then I asked another with the same results. "You know, for email!!" I said. They were still puzzled. Then one of the girls that worked in the lab said "Oh you need to setup your email?" I was finally relieved to be talking to someone that knew what they were talking about. "Yes!" I replied. "Mark, show him how to make a hotmail account." she said. I just closed my eyes and sighed. I then explained that it's not hotmail I'm after. GOD!! These are lab technicians that are supposed to know anything yet they don't even know what POP email is, they know nothing beyond a web browser. I doubt they could even install a web browser themselves. I still wanted to have POP mail, so the next day I asked again but this time I asked when someone who runs the network will be there". I was told later for a few days. Then one day he was finally there. I asked him about it, and even he was a bit unsure of it, but he said that nobody uses the DeVry mail and it can't be accessed outside of the building because people were abusing it. YEAH RIGHT. Nobody in DeVry is smart enough to know how to use it let alone abuse it...Unreal. I am now proud to be DeVry-Free as I search for a real University to attend.
In The End
There are plenty more DeVry horror stories that I will leave untold in this text as they are basically just more of what you've already read. I hope that this
text has informed some people and if it changes even one person's mind about attending this "college" then it has achieved it's goal. Don't worry, dumb asses
will continue to attend because they will not think of researching DeVry on the internet and will never find this page. DeVry will continue to make money off
this, the few professors they have that are actually not complete idiots will become frustrated enough to leave, as many have already done. Perhaps if someone
is going for a "business" degree, they might consider DeVry, as this field is full of bullshiters on it's own anyway in our society as it is today. If you
don't want to be a bullshit business person and actually want to do a good job at it and are not concerned solely on making money, then I advise you to go to a
normal university. DeVry is just like a McDonalds chain, expanding quite frequently as it profits. As I've proven with many examples in this text, everything
DeVry does is for money. They will go to the extreme with getting money, squeeze out as much money as they can from the students to the last penny, and rarely
re-invest it into the educational system. If it is re-invested, then only in the new expanding buildings, only to make more money in other regions of the
country. DeVry's slogan is true, DeVry is for a higher degree of success. What most people don't realize however is that the slogan is referring not to the
student, but rather to DeVry Inc. itself.
This is a part of Joz's Homepage.