DI attended DeVry in the early 90s with the hopes of getting into the T-Comm field. I still have a huge student loan that I can't afford to pay and have had forbearances and deferments over the past decade. After attending for a year and getting as far as the 3rd trimester, I saw how this for-profit school makes its money.
Your acceptance to the school is pretty quick and easy, along with the signing your life away for your student loans and grants. As the classes progress, fewer and fewer of you and your fellow students have a clue of what the instuctor is talking about. When you consult with your advisor, you're encouraged to get extra help with tutoring. But it gets no clearer and by the 3rd trimester, your fellow students are a third of what they were when you started. That is if YOU'RE still there! By the 4th trimester, you may have about 10 left of the original 35 that filled your first classes! The numbers continue to decline by graduation where I think 5 of my group may have made it, NOT including myself.
The con is getting all of these students who are not college ready, as well as techinically-challenged in on the front-end, where they make their money from the loans and grants.By the 4th trimester, many folks have become discouraged and made to feel that it was THEY who are at fault for not being able to keep up with the accelerated program when in actuality, it is a program for those that technically savvy by those who are technically savvy.
If someone takes you step-by-step with introducing you to the curriculum, that would be one thing. But instead, it's taught as if you already have an idea of what it is in the first place.By the 3rd trimester, I finally found out what T-Comm was and found that I was not interested in that field. It since has become defunct after the Telecom bubble burst by 2000. (The admissions rep hyped it up as a new open field of future. That future lasted a decade - thanks to the economy and automation that makes personnel unnecessary)
The upside is that since I've attended, more schools have accepted my "college credits" from DeVry where they were formally not. I still owe MUCH money on student loans for core classes that would have been MUCH less had I attended the local community college instead of DeVry. But you're convinced that getting a BS in 3 years is a better way than an AA in 2 years. The AA would have been more helpful and MUCH cheaper in the immediate AND the long run. Also, in IL, the state required that DeVry raise its admissions testing requirement, so not as many (unqualified) folks would be admitted and doomed to fail - while DeVry still got the money. This may not be the case in other states.
Vincent
Marietta, Georgia
U.S.A.
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