Anyone who got scammed into attending DeVry, or worse, that shit Keller Graduate School of Management, you have my deepest sympathies. Most of you have learned that, not only are you in debt, but the only job you can get is the exact same job you had working your way through school. Yeah, I got scammed by DeVry in the mid-1980s. I had an associates from a real Junior College so I realized right away just how they were screwing us.
Once you start with trimesters and credits that don’t transfer you are screwed. You either ride it out and hope the degree transfers or you quit and eat a big student loan.
It appears DeVry victims will now get a bit of relief. Even that shit Keller school is included in this list.
I’ve Written About DeVry Before
Yes, I’ve written about DeVry before. Actually touched on it in this post. The sad truth is we need a not-for-profit version of the DeVry program I went through today. IBM COBOL, JCL, VSAM, CICS now needs DB2 and the companies still using IBM mainframes need to pool their needs.
Those of us who know COBOL are either dead, in the gummer home, or very long in the tooth. The companies still using IBM mainframe technology have viciously incompetent management. They brought in Vendor Managment Systems and are now looking to pay dramatically below market rate. Adding insult to injury every posting wants 10 years of experience and they want someone that is under 25. If a person actually has all of those skills they have 30+ years on the platform and aren’t going to work for summer intern wages.
Build What You Need
IBM needs to quit using visa workers. It needs to sit down with 5-8 of its largest mainframe customers and ask the simple question.
Within 5 years, how many mainframe developers are you going to need?
There will be a number. Probably 30-60. Then they need to set up a school. Not an accredited school. A school that each of these companies kicks a bit of money into along with IBM. With the money comes the pledge to hire N graduates who get 3.0 or higher on a 4.0 scale.
Students will have to be on-site the first year, getting the fundamentals of programming logic, hex math, and yes, that most dreaded course, flow charting. Will you use flow charts in real life? System level, yes. Program level, no. Flow charting will be a short course. It is needed to help teach structured programming and so they can see a solution.
Agile gives you shit like this
We can’t have shit like that in real systems.
Shut Down Most For Profit Schools
Honestly, I thought DeVry would get shut down right after ITT. Instead it got sold. Oh yes, a $100 million settlement happened, but, it appears I was too far in the past to ever have been sent a claim form. When I attended it was still owned by Bell & Howell Co. Just before the shit Keller schools bought DeVry. School owner sure has had a lot of names. That’s the kind of thing you see with shit nursing homes so they can keep resetting the Medicare investigation clocks.
Recruiters for DeVry would come to your home and talk about the video game console that was “created in their labs.” Not sure which one it was. Think it was Atari or Coleco. It was one you saw advertised on television so it hooked a lot of parents.
Filling out the financial aid paperwork was a big industry for that school. They even brought in TAs (students working as teacher assistants) to help you fill out the paperwork when you attended one of those in-person parent conferences. The entire business was about funneling student loans and federal dollars into the corporate coffers.
Yes, we were all promised we “would get a job in our field” after graduation. They even included me in those states and I had a job as a midnight computer operator all through school. I got that job the way everyone got jobs back then, the Chicago Tribune want ads. Given I lived two hours away from Chicago, that was quite a feat.
Admittedly
Admittedly, I could not have attended DeVry without the government grants and student loan programs. I would not have met some people who are still my friends today. I attended weddings and everything. The slick advertisements, however, steered me away from a real school. The Junior College I attended was linked to ISU. The credits and Associates degree would have transferred. ISU had a top rated computer science program then and I seem to remember someone from ISU coming to speak with those of us getting near the end of our time at Junior College.
So yes. I would have been immensely disappointed at not getting to go to the school with the slick college ads, but I would have attended a better school. Yes, they lied to me, all of us really, about a placement office that was going to get us a job in our field after graduation. I already had mine. Got my first programming job the same way, Chicago Tribune want ads.
Really Want to Know
Sears was already heading down the tubes. DeVry was setup to pipe graduates into State Farm and Sears. Maybe All-State too, I forget. If one of them didn’t hire you, that was it, you were screwed.
This one nice guy named Jim, worked at Jewel Foods while attending. A year or two later he was still working at Jewel Foods. Had to enroll in a different school to work on an accounting minor and stall off student loan payments.
I really want to know just how many of the kids who graduated with me actually got a job in IT. Even more I want to know just how many had one three years later.
The Problem
The problem with DeVry was the intentional fraud. They didn’t say, “Hey! We accept 60 students each trimester. Sears, All-State, and State Farm hire 20-45 who actually graduate. The rest are ()*)(*&ed.” Instead they ran slick ads, everywhere, all the time. Trying to maximize profit while not caring about education.
Yeah, I described something similar above. Difference is, the “students” would be paid a small amount, put up in some dorm situation and told up front, “not everybody is going to make it.” There are no credits to actually transfer, but you get a small paycheck along with a place to live. If you graduate, but don’t get hired, you will coast through your first year at a real school’s IT program because you already know all the fundamentals. You can focus on lit class, psych, and a few other “generals.”
Summary
We need to ban use of government grants and student loans at for-profit institutions. The incentive for fraud is too high.
