Thread regarding DeVry Inc. layoffs

Yes, zickering and Hamberders aside, we used to have 3-4 career services staff and they did put in the work. Most of them "saw it coming" with layoffs and proactively took other positions with more reputable schools. This was about 6-7 years ago

It was not always this way. At least on our campus, I remember a well-staffed career services team with a good mix of experience, but then came the long, slow dismantling and consolidation of the organization’s infrastructure, and this included career services. This is just one example of how the organization you see now is not what we were.

I've worked at 4 large school systems. DeVry career services is the sleepiest by far. They seem to be nice, but they hired telemarketers at the HQ to be "career counselors". Many of them had barely any experience in career coaching, recruiting, if any at all. Look them up on LinkedIn. You'll see that the ones in Illinois are career advisors, but look at the jobs they held beforehand.

Per Betsy DeVos, we should now really refer to Daniel Hamberger as “Hamberder” and Patrick Unzicker as “Covfefe”.

Just kidding.

Still want to know exactly how one zickers and what the benefits of undoing it actually are.

This is the lawsuit that shows the details of the CEO,CAO,COO VP Enrollment, VP Career Services all in the know of inflating numbers:
http://securities.stanford.edu/filings-documents/1058/DEGI00_01/2018129_r01c_16CV05198.pdf

@2diz,

I did leave when the standards were lowered too far–the intro Business class was focused on starting a lemonade stand and taking pictures of a WalMart! And let's not start with the monitoring of faculty performance and favoritism.

And I'm not saying that there weren't systematic problems with low admissions standards, placements, and gainful employment. Overall, and especially for online, the reality may be more in line with what 1ced said.

But to those of us who got to teach live students in a real classroom, we had a chance to make a difference. Some of us did, and it worked. I'm not clearly going to post names or even job titles of former students, but if you search on LinkedIn, you will find quite a few successful DeVry grads.

Maybe my campus was an exception. Maybe my students were better prepared–many of them were ex-military or community college grads. Maybe I tried harder.

But not all of us failed! Not all of our students graduated to the same retail jobs that they started with. A few of them did, as I mentioned, but I would say that it was more the exception from my own experience.

I'm sorry if it makes anyone upset but that's my lived experience. I didn't spend two decades of my life wasting my time or anyone's student loans. I taught them real concepts, and most of them "got" it. And then a lot of them got jobs.

Yes, it's likely that the job placement numbers were over inflated. I'm not claiming that they weren't. Even in my own experience, placement wasn't perfect in the field. I had nothing do with that, and have always been wary of those kinds of claims. But the numbers aren't 0% placement either, and that's an important part of the story. Please understand that some of us worked there (and I'm guessing, still do!) in good faith and had positive results.

To the last comment: one of the signs of poor placement is a high Cohort Default Rate. We’ve had issues with this, being in double digit CDRs

Let’s put it this way. In my roughly 12 year employment there, I saw two students pay their loans in full. One was from an inheritance and the other was due to disability discharge. Just about every other student owed more years after leaving than when they left.

Here are the most recent placement reports from the DeVry site:
It looks like they weren't really tracked, that's usually an indicator of poor placement rates.

https://www.devry.edu/d/graduate-employment-outcomes.pdf

Kyle: my experience is the same as what you described. Many students have done just fine. However, there are people here who make sweeping general statements that are emotional assertions, not facts.

@1ced

I have to call bullsh7t on this:

For the very few who do graduate, virtually none find gainful employment that they didn’t have prior to enrollment or that is not associated with the school itself.

I left a few years ago as academic standards were declining but:

1. We graduated most of the students in the technical programs I taught in
2. Most of my students left knowing how to do and think through a wide variety of technical tasks
3. Many (but not all) got technical jobs within a few years after graduating

Yes, there were some non-starters unwilling to pound the pavement to get a position but I am still in touch with many former students who are gainfully employed in their field of study! The system overall may be closer to what you describe but it wasn’t like that everywhere. Some of us cared quite a bit, put in the work, and lifted our students to better things!

It's true. And it's still true.

If a postsecondary institution advertises job placement statistics to recruit students, federal law requires that the institution be able to substantiate the truthfulness of such claims. In August 2015, the Department requested that DeVry provide data and other information to substantiate DeVry’s advertised claim that, since 1975, 90 percent of its graduates were employed in their field of study within six months of graduation. After reviewing the information that DeVry provided, Federal Student Aid found that DeVry could not provide evidence to substantiate this claim.

DeVry continues to defraud students and the government. The numbers across the board are either inflated by their own "placement formula". They decreased the number of career services and student services staff in the past five years and they still claim these high rates? I don't think so. The team is just a bunch of lip service. Students are on their own looking for jobs after they graduate. And like the previous poster, they are either still in the same job before DeVry and working some menial job and defaulting on their loans.

Facts? Ok. Here’s some facts. Since at least 2008 and continuing today, Devry enrolls anyone who breathes, passes them for doing almost no class work while feeding off the taxpayer dime. The vast majority of these students make no dent in repaying their student loans years after leaving, with many defaulting within a few years. For the very few who do graduate, virtually none find gainful employment that they didn’t have prior to enrollment or that is not associated with the school itself. Could Devry have improved? Yes, by raising admission standards and turning away refund seeking fraudsters. Will they do that? No. Because the mission has always been about numbers.

This was last year. And career services and other items were squared away in 2017 by legal and top management. We did have issues in the past because the formula can be tricky. Personally, I wouldn't put numbers out there if we could avoid it.

This old news being dredged up again? Read the article and it starts right in with a weasel-worded statement like “purported class.” Then it says, “Many DeVry students are saddled with over of $100,000 in student loan debt...” There’s probably some student out there that ran up an id–tic tab like this, but I can’t name even one, let alone “many.” This is just unsubstantiated garbage. Legal firms troll for disgruntled customers all the time to initiate suits like this, and any large organization or licensed professional has been sued at some point. It’s the American way. Whoever is posting this junk here is making a feeble and obvious attempt at a psychological operation to try to destabilize members of the workforce. We’re past that. How about we instead post some facts or credible points that are relevant to revealing the strategy of senior management or helping us assess the direction of the organization?

I wouldn't say we inflate numbers. We use a formula that the top management set.