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Devry University: worth it?
- Thread starter Stridder44
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FWIW I used to work as an admissions officer for a school similar to DeVry and I can tell you it's all a scam. All of these kinds of schools are for profit so their interests lay in their bottom dollar, not your education or future well being. These enrollment advisors or admissions reps are all nothing but used car salesmen who will use any tactic they can to get you to sign up. None of their credits transfer to a real college so you're stuck with them for the duration. They'll trick you into believing that financial aid will cover most, it not everything, as far as your tuition goes which is false. Then there's the promise of them finding you a job once you graduate. They'll find you a job, yes. Will they find you a career choice? No. People who enrolled in the school I was at graduated and found themselves working at Walmart to pay off their tuition. The school I worked at was for medical degrees BTW.
I'm glad I got fired from that hole since all the people who work at these types of places are all shady and untrustworthy. Don't believe all the hype these schools dish out with their commercials and all. Those people in those commercials are probably the top 1% of students while the rest languish in misery trying to pay back $50k in loans.
I'm glad I got fired from that hole since all the people who work at these types of places are all shady and untrustworthy. Don't believe all the hype these schools dish out with their commercials and all. Those people in those commercials are probably the top 1% of students while the rest languish in misery trying to pay back $50k in loans.
There's a stigma attached to the school that makes it difficult to get a job or get promoted. That stigma will follow you for the rest of your career unless you do something to overshadow it like get a Masters degree from a more reputable school. The stigma is like becoming a doctor and going for a D.O. instead of an M.D. You will not be taken seriously.
If you want to do grad school, many schools won't recognize a Devry B.S. The ones that do will treat it like a history degree and make you retake half of the courses you took for your BS.
Half the degrees they offer are worthless flavor of the month degrees. IE degrees in renewable energy, bioinformatics, etc. Back when I was there, they had a degree called Telecom Management which was supposed to allow you to be a network admin. By the time I graduated, the dot com bubble burst and everyone I knew who spent 50 grand on that degree went nowhere.
The marketing is BS. Two things you constantly hear are that Devry is hands-on and they will find a job for you. They are not any more hands-on than a 4 year university because the hands-on portion is just the same weekly lab you'd have to take at a 4 year. And job placement is terrible. They will try to stick you anywhere, even if it has nothing to do with your major.
The front office consists of sales reps who will tell you things like, 5 out of every 7 students are not smart enough to attend to Devry. It's nonsense. I had friends who were locked up for 5-10 years whose parole officers enrolled them at Devry when they got out.
The ironic thing is the quality of education is actually not that bad. But we go to school because it's a means to an end and in that regard, Devry is useless.
Here's a link to a Yahoo Answers response I wrote a year ago.
That is another good point. Again, my experience with UoP and not Devry (same thing in my opinion though) was that the 3 classes I took in one term were not considered when I moved to another school for my Bachelors. So I spent 5 weeks, 3 courses and tons of cash to only be able to speak of my experience later in life.
I'm reminded of something a former CEO of a company said to me while I was standing in an elevator with him. He asked who I was and what I did in my free time, which I then told him about my schooling at UoP and he said only one thing before stepping out of the elevator, "never do anything in life that you would not want on a resume."
Obviously that's fairly extreme but in the end, he had a point. A good friend's brother graduated from UoP and got a job right away, at UoP. Not a bad gig and he gets paid a lot but UoP can't employ everyone.
I have a lot of respect for education, even those attending UoP, Devry and the likes, but it was just wrong for me.
DeVry is a TERRIBLE school. Here's why:
First, some back story. Let me say I did go there for four years and graduated in October (and still have yet to get my degree in the mail). I chose the school because I needed a fully accredited online school while I took a job overseas.
DeVry was not the only college I went to. I also went to Penn State and a community college called South Hills. Each college I went to it was for computer science classes.
I already had a strong grasp of what I needed to know since I am a constant self study-er but I needed the piece of paper so I stuck it out at DeVry. (Penn State at the time has almost nothing for online classes).
Now, the school does teach the standard type classes and it starts off really good. (Some classes are actually really good and the programming classes were leaps and bounds better than the programming classes I took at Penn State.)
Then things changed. Group work (always useless) starts getting assigned more and more. There are always a few students in a class of 20 - 30 who know what they are doing, and are forced to carry the rest of the class through all of the work. This is how DeVry artificially inflates how many students are passing the classes. By the middle of the second year, you will most likely always be doing group work in a group with students who have only passed the classes because they rode on other students shoulders.
To give you an example of this, I, along with one girl in my class carried an entire group of about 30 students through our Game Engine programming class. Her and I worked day and night using C++ and OpenGL to create some basic modules for a small game engine and the rest of the class who couldn't even write a line of code (and often stole their code straight from books) ALL PASSED!!! I was furious (as was she). This was far from an isolated incident. This will happen with every class as soon as the harder classes hit. I cared about my grade so I worked hard for it going way beyond what was expected of me and sadly others got to leech off of my work.
Another thing is most of the students are completely blind to what they need to know. I was always vocal about waste of time things we had to do in our classes (like countless garbage writing assignments instead of writing code) and other students thought I was wrong and that the writing assignments were useful!
I'm sorry, knowing how to code gets you a job, not knowing how to write about coding.
The school also has no quality standards when it comes to projects. I'd make the best projects I could and someone who turned in something I could crank out in minutes would get the same grade. Horrifying. Students would turn in papers and such full of typos and still get good grades. That shouldn't be surprising seeing how as many of the lectures had typos in them, and many of the code examples used outdated or just plain incorrect code and coding standards. (Using void main() in a C++ program comes to mind).
The school is a giant waste of money, but sadly its one of the only places people like me who work overseas often could take. (That has since changed since Penn State's world campus has a lot more offerings).
There is also the stigma of going to such a school. People see DeVry grads as idiots (and mostly rightfully so). Its unfortunate because there are those of us, like myself who needed the paper only and are penalized for going to such a school. Fortunately for me as soon as I graduated I started working on a portfolio and hopefully that will show my skills and people can overlook where I got my degree.
That leads me to one last thing, the school will load you up with so much garbage work that forget about improving your skills while you are in college, that will have to wait until after. Its sad but true.
Stay far far away from that piece of **** school.
EDIT: Oh, and most of the professors don't give a **** either. One of my professors didn't even look at my final project presentation that I worked my ass off on, he just gave me a C and was done with it. 4 months of work, learning to 3D model, rig, and animate game characters and create all 3D models from scratch, build the levels within Unity (mind you I'm a programmer not an artist) and I get a C because the other **** stains in my group didn't do their parts.
EDIT 2: FYI not everyone who goes to that school is bad. Many of us do know what we are doing and were simply there for the paper.
First, some back story. Let me say I did go there for four years and graduated in October (and still have yet to get my degree in the mail). I chose the school because I needed a fully accredited online school while I took a job overseas.
DeVry was not the only college I went to. I also went to Penn State and a community college called South Hills. Each college I went to it was for computer science classes.
I already had a strong grasp of what I needed to know since I am a constant self study-er but I needed the piece of paper so I stuck it out at DeVry. (Penn State at the time has almost nothing for online classes).
Now, the school does teach the standard type classes and it starts off really good. (Some classes are actually really good and the programming classes were leaps and bounds better than the programming classes I took at Penn State.)
Then things changed. Group work (always useless) starts getting assigned more and more. There are always a few students in a class of 20 - 30 who know what they are doing, and are forced to carry the rest of the class through all of the work. This is how DeVry artificially inflates how many students are passing the classes. By the middle of the second year, you will most likely always be doing group work in a group with students who have only passed the classes because they rode on other students shoulders.
To give you an example of this, I, along with one girl in my class carried an entire group of about 30 students through our Game Engine programming class. Her and I worked day and night using C++ and OpenGL to create some basic modules for a small game engine and the rest of the class who couldn't even write a line of code (and often stole their code straight from books) ALL PASSED!!! I was furious (as was she). This was far from an isolated incident. This will happen with every class as soon as the harder classes hit. I cared about my grade so I worked hard for it going way beyond what was expected of me and sadly others got to leech off of my work.
Another thing is most of the students are completely blind to what they need to know. I was always vocal about waste of time things we had to do in our classes (like countless garbage writing assignments instead of writing code) and other students thought I was wrong and that the writing assignments were useful!
I'm sorry, knowing how to code gets you a job, not knowing how to write about coding. The school also has no quality standards when it comes to projects. I'd make the best projects I could and someone who turned in something I could crank out in minutes would get the same grade. Horrifying. Students would turn in papers and such full of typos and still get good grades. That shouldn't be surprising seeing how as many of the lectures had typos in them, and many of the code examples used outdated or just plain incorrect code and coding standards. (Using void main() in a C++ program comes to mind).
The school is a giant waste of money, but sadly its one of the only places people like me who work overseas often could take. (That has since changed since Penn State's world campus has a lot more offerings).
There is also the stigma of going to such a school. People see DeVry grads as idiots (and mostly rightfully so). Its unfortunate because there are those of us, like myself who needed the paper only and are penalized for going to such a school. Fortunately for me as soon as I graduated I started working on a portfolio and hopefully that will show my skills and people can overlook where I got my degree.
That leads me to one last thing, the school will load you up with so much garbage work that forget about improving your skills while you are in college, that will have to wait until after. Its sad but true.
Stay far far away from that piece of **** school.
EDIT: Oh, and most of the professors don't give a **** either. One of my professors didn't even look at my final project presentation that I worked my ass off on, he just gave me a C and was done with it. 4 months of work, learning to 3D model, rig, and animate game characters and create all 3D models from scratch, build the levels within Unity (mind you I'm a programmer not an artist) and I get a C because the other **** stains in my group didn't do their parts.
EDIT 2: FYI not everyone who goes to that school is bad. Many of us do know what we are doing and were simply there for the paper.
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They aren't accredited. They are a trade school. They just say university to not sound as worthless as they are.
They actually are fully accredited which is how I fell in to the trap. How they got an accreditation is beyond me.
Also they're not really a tech school either. You have the same types of classes there as you do at a traditional college. See my big post above about them.
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Any of these "schools" looking to operate, legally anyways, need to be accredited in some way/shape/form whether it be nationally/locally. Now what standards are used to gain their accreditation is questionable. Last I checked there wasn't any real monitoring or policing of these for-profit schools so it's pretty lax in terms of "standards" at these placed. These schools are all about making money as they're businesses, not places of learning.
One school that interviewed me for a position ran massage therapy classes. They weren't accredited by the state or anything however they were "approved" by some massage therapy association and that was good enough for them. Granted, not quite the same a mechanical or IT training but you get the idea.
One school that interviewed me for a position ran massage therapy classes. They weren't accredited by the state or anything however they were "approved" by some massage therapy association and that was good enough for them. Granted, not quite the same a mechanical or IT training but you get the idea.
It's good that you saw it for what it was and got out. I'm similar except I spent 3 years and graduated, then went through 3 years of mediocre jobs, then another 2+ years in grad school before getting to a point where I had a decent career.
Same here. I always tell my friends that education opens doors and tell them to do as much school as they can before they start families. But I can't see any upside to Devry, Woodberry, Phoenix, etc. Not when you can get the same exact thing at a 4 year or junior college/transfer for less money and better job prospects.
Schools are not accredited, degrees are. Accreditation is done degree by degree as well as campus by campus. Since there are a ton of Devry campuses, an ABET accredited degree at one campus might not be accredited at another even though it's the same exact thing. And out of all the degrees a campus offers, only a handful might qualify for accreditation to begin with. None of those flavor of the month degrees are accredited. Degrees like EET might be though, but only if that campus has gone through the auditing process.
In the big picture, none of this really matters because accredited or not, Devry still has its crap reputation set in stone. The only reason why it might matter is if you're getting one of their technology degrees and want to take the EIT exam.
From what I understand, PIMA is much like that as well. My wife works as a dental hygienist, she told me that PIMA began offering a dental hygiene course a couple years ago, but that a lot of the dentists will avoid hiring PIMA graduates, because of a stigma attached to the quality of the program. Whether or not the program is even really that bad, isn't as relevant as the perception that dentists apparently have about it. I don't know much about PIMA myself.
Devry I sort of have second hand experience with. I began a program at a school by the name of Denver Technical College years ago. It was a terrible school, and I cut my losses and got out of it, despite very good grades. It was purchased by Devry, not long after. I don't know if Devry is any better, worse, or the same as Denver Technical College. But that was the closest I came to attending Devry.
DeVry is a TERRIBLE school. Here's why:
First, some back story. Let me say I did go there for four years and graduated in October (and still have yet to get my degree in the mail). I chose the school because I needed a fully accredited online school while I took a job overseas.
DeVry was not the only college I went to. I also went to Penn State and a community college called South Hills. Each college I went to it was for computer science classes.
I already had a strong grasp of what I needed to know since I am a constant self study-er but I needed the piece of paper so I stuck it out at DeVry. (Penn State at the time has almost nothing for online classes).
Now, the school does teach the standard type classes and it starts off really good. (Some classes are actually really good and the programming classes were leaps and bounds better than the programming classes I took at Penn State.)
Then things changed. Group work (always useless) starts getting assigned more and more. There are always a few students in a class of 20 - 30 who know what they are doing, and are forced to carry the rest of the class through all of the work. This is how DeVry artificially inflates how many students are passing the classes. By the middle of the second year, you will most likely always be doing group work in a group with students who have only passed the classes because they rode on other students shoulders.
To give you an example of this, I, along with one girl in my class carried an entire group of about 30 students through our Game Engine programming class. Her and I worked day and night using C++ and OpenGL to create some basic modules for a small game engine and the rest of the class who couldn't even write a line of code (and often stole their code straight from books) ALL PASSED!!! I was furious (as was she). This was far from an isolated incident. This will happen with every class as soon as the harder classes hit. I cared about my grade so I worked hard for it going way beyond what was expected of me and sadly others got to leech off of my work.
Another thing is most of the students are completely blind to what they need to know. I was always vocal about waste of time things we had to do in our classes (like countless garbage writing assignments instead of writing code) and other students thought I was wrong and that the writing assignments were useful!
The school also has no quality standards when it comes to projects. I'd make the best projects I could and someone who turned in something I could crank out in minutes would get the same grade. Horrifying. Students would turn in papers and such full of typos and still get good grades. That shouldn't be surprising seeing how as many of the lectures had typos in them, and many of the code examples used outdated or just plain incorrect code and coding standards. (Using void main() in a C++ program comes to mind).
The school is a giant waste of money, but sadly its one of the only places people like me who work overseas often could take. (That has since changed since Penn State's world campus has a lot more offerings).
There is also the stigma of going to such a school. People see DeVry grads as idiots (and mostly rightfully so). Its unfortunate because there are those of us, like myself who needed the paper only and are penalized for going to such a school. Fortunately for me as soon as I graduated I started working on a portfolio and hopefully that will show my skills and people can overlook where I got my degree.
That leads me to one last thing, the school will load you up with so much garbage work that forget about improving your skills while you are in college, that will have to wait until after. Its sad but true.
Stay far far away from that piece of **** school.
EDIT: Oh, and most of the professors don't give a **** either. One of my professors didn't even look at my final project presentation that I worked my ass off on, he just gave me a C and was done with it. 4 months of work, learning to 3D model, rig, and animate game characters and create all 3D models from scratch, build the levels within Unity (mind you I'm a programmer not an artist) and I get a C because the other **** stains in my group didn't do their parts.
EDIT 2: FYI not everyone who goes to that school is bad. Many of us do know what we are doing and were simply there for the paper.
Why not attend the local university where you moved. Most universities teach in English nowadays (except Asian unis). For example, in Germany/Sweden it's not hard to take courses solely in English and if not, learning enough Swedish/German to sit in on a class only takes roughly 9-12 months?
I worked in a war zone
I was there for three years. Attending the local university wasn't an option for me (not to mention I'm sure it wouldn't have been in English anyway )
It depends on what field you are going into. Schools like DeVry, ITT, University of Phoenix, etc.. Will train you in the basics of whatever it is you are looking to do. They will let you earn a college degree in whatever you choose to study. Those three will help place you in a job when you graduate as well. The fact that they will help you find a job in this really terrible economy would be a reason to consider them.
There are some things to ask when meeting with them before you agree to attend. How transferable are their credits to other schools? Will I have an Accredited degree when I graduate? etc... Ask away before you sign up, and commit to something.
A college education is expensive at a university. It's not always cheap at DeVry etc.. sometimes either, but less then Harvard, etc... As for being marketable and skilled when you enter the workplace is and always will be on you. That has nothing to do with where you went to get your degree.
It really doesn't matter a whole bunch what school you went to usually. Anywhere you go to get your degree is usually fine by most employers because; an entry level job is what you're going to get coming out of college at 21-26 with no additional professional certificates, and proven job experience period. You're not going to be the Head of Neurosurgery at a hospital, fresh out of medical school, and you're not going to be the Lead Project Manager in some technical field fresh out of any college with just your degree behind you.
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I do have to say DeVry does do this well. My career counselor has been in touch with me constantly trying to find something in my field. That being said though I don't feel I have the skill to enter the job market. So much of my time was wasted with frivolous work (spending 100+ hours a week on school work as a full time student since I was one of the "class carriers") that I had no time to work on the skills I needed.
Since graduation I've been hammering through book after book while all my programming skills come back to me.
They will lie. They'll tell you anything for your money.
Ok, this is a pretty misleading statement. Your quality of education will be substantially better and your bills substantially lower by going to your local state university by way of a community college.
The help you find a job claim is BS. You're better off at a 4 year, where companies send interviewers to do actual recruiting, than having some career counseler running around half-heartedly trying to place you in jobs that oftentimes have nothing to do with your major.
I'll lay it out right here. ITT has no meaningful accreditation. Devry is TAC/ABET accredited for certain degrees only.
Devry is way more expensive than a university. You're paying a premium to get a degree with horrible brand recognition, when you could be paying less to get a 4 year degree that makes it easier for you to get a job later. There's no upside.
Far as jumpstarting a career, there's a smart way to do it which is make things easier on yourself by making the right decisions at the beginning. Going to Devry is like going to Med School in the Carribean or getting a D.O. Yeah you might be competent but you'll be fighting an uphill battle from that point on. If you succeed and land a job you can brag about, you're the exception, not the rule.
And the school you pick directly correlates to being marketable because that's one of the first things HR looks for.
School does matter. HR gets so many resumes, superficial things like school name get used to filter out candidates before the interview.
I don't know where you're getting all of this from but it's wrong
Do you mean Woodbury? Woodbury is no where near the class that Devry and UoP is. Woodbury is where I wanted to go and finish my B.Arch. Unless you really meant Woodberry, then that is a school I've never heard of.
Wow, who bumped this old thread?
In any case, thank you all for the replies and advice. I was already enrolled in a CC at the time and have since transfered. I had a friend who went to DeVry and got out quickly, but I always questioned the legitimacies of a "college" that advertises on TV.
In any case, thank you all for the replies and advice. I was already enrolled in a CC at the time and have since transfered. I had a friend who went to DeVry and got out quickly, but I always questioned the legitimacies of a "college" that advertises on TV.
DeVry is one of the few reputable "for profit" schools. They have been around for decades.
I have a cousin goinng there, currently. From what he's talked about, the classes and professors seem more than adept and qualified. So, from a knowledge and learning standpoint, DeVry is "worth it." However, I can't say how well the degree would motivate future employers....I can't imagine it would be any more negative or positive than a community college.
I have a cousin goinng there, currently. From what he's talked about, the classes and professors seem more than adept and qualified. So, from a knowledge and learning standpoint, DeVry is "worth it." However, I can't say how well the degree would motivate future employers....I can't imagine it would be any more negative or positive than a community college.
Several months before I graduated from ITT they started getting me interviews with different companies. I had four interviews from four different employers. I got a better job myself so I opted to decline the jobs.
I graduated from ITT and I have a college degree. My credits are transferable to any College in the United States. I know this because The University I am now attending accepted them.
I didn't go to De Vry so I wouldn't know their policies. I do know that after doing some research to save for my child's College education the rough estimate for a Bachelors degree at a four year university starts at around $35,000.00 minimum a year. That does not include housing, books food, etc. Multiply that by four years and that comes out to be about $140,000.00.
ITT cost me less then half of that FYI. Also regardless of where you go once you take out a school loan you will pay it back plus interest regardless of whether you graduate or not.
I lived it.
Acceptance of college credits is very dependent on the school...
Hardly. Tuition at a public 4 year in state is much less.....in my case less than 10k a year. What public schools have in-state tuition being 35k a year?
as have I and multiple others in this thread