Thread regarding DeVry Inc. layoffs

Indeed "Best Faculty Forward" is an excuse to cover their shortcomings and bossy attitudes!

"Many of the comments on here seem to suggest that if work isn't turned in on time, every time, and exceeding requirements in every way, that the student should just fail."

I don't think this at all, and I don't know anyone who does. Many courses have a deliverable each week, and at least 1 course has 13 assignments in an 8 week session--and that's a course-design problem.

Students can be set up for failure because they can't get work in (or enough in for a pass). Other students are set up for mediocrity: they get work in, but there is no time to hand in anything qualitative. Few, if any, can hand in anything excellent--there simply is no time for high-quality work to occur.

Most of my colleagues were patient, allowed work to be handed in late, but with so many students--some faculty carry over 100 students in a session--it's impossible, logistically, to take late work as a routine expectation.

and Dream Center got the toy guy and the marketing genius of devry

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2018/01/prweb15078849.htm

@ReN0zpj-wgc

Excellent post. My experiences vary somewhat, since at my campus we tend to get a lot of community college transfers, and they tend to be much more prepared and able to handle the work than what others are seeing across the system. If that were not true, I would have just had to quit years ago. As it is, I am holding on until I can find another position. Academic jobs searches take a full-year, from September application, through January screening, through March campus interviews, to August start for the following year. Yes, I know it's a long shot, but I have a brand-name doctorate and actual journal publications. I have minimized the impact of DV on my resume and am willing to take an entry level faculty job for about 1/3 - 1/2 of my current salary. I had three campus interviews last year and feel like I am making progress on getting out of the place. Really what I am fighting against now is agism in the academic market--I was told outright by one school that they were looking for a younger candidate, but that's a different story. This is my third hiring season and I have 30 applications, each of which required a unique cover letter, etc.

I am a teacher because I love to share knowledge, and I firmly believe that anyone, regardless of where he or she starts from, can learn and do better. Maybe I am naive, but I enjoy getting that connection moment where a student breaks through and understands a concept that he or she didn't before the class. And I don't mind the concept of remedial education, and moving anyone ahead from where they start will give them more of an edge in life. I think that many of the critics of the school here are holding it up to impossible standards of performance that even traditional schools wouldn't meet. Back in my day, sonny, you turned in one 15-page paper at the end of a class, and that was it, aside from showing up and participating. You're not going to get perfect assignments, on time, in an 8 week class, when there are three assignments a week, consistently, from admittedly stressed out and underprepared students. But I do get readable papers with college level writing, and sometimes I make allowances for lateness, yes. I am sorry if that surprises you, dear reader, because I do understand that your campus may be different, as may your views of education. Many of the comments on here seem to suggest that if work isn't turned in on time, every time, and exceeding requirements in every way, that the student should just fail. I do not agree with that view of education. That's meanness, or hazing. Those are the kinds of teachers that students remember negatively decades later, vs. the teachers you remember for being kind and encouraging. School shouldn't be a work-gang or a prison mentality. It should expose you to concepts and help you on the way to mastering them. The original concept of the "C" is that it was...acceptable. AKA the traditional baseline for performance in higher education was "you did okay". Graduating from Podunk State U. meant that you did pretty good in your classes, despite four years of partying, pledging a sorority/fraternity, and so on. You generally met the requirements, and did your work on time. It didn't mean that you were a certified genius in your field (Ivies, Big-10, etc., notwithstanding).

Calling DV a "University" was a branding mistake; it should have stayed as a "Technical Institute". DV works well as Community College Part Deux and offered online and evening classes to students who otherwise wouldn't have been able to work on getting a degree in a field not offered elsewhere. Now states are moving toward allowing CCs to grant bachelor's degrees, and making some public colleges free to those who met certain standards. They are also offering degrees online, and improving transfer agreements to guarantee credits for CC work at a receiving four-year school. DV's programs are too similar to what exists cheaper elsewhere, except perhaps in Networking, and it no longer has its niche. It has been in survival mode, shedding locations and staff as enrollments continue to decline. Yes, Virginia, campuses and centers are like ghost towns and have been for years. You can blame, in part, the idiotic scheduling software that attempted to build classes based on trial-and-error. It was all error. As an example, once it generated five sections of an intro class, when there were enough students to run exactly one. Two of them were at the same time in the same room, offset by an hour.

It put those sections out and allowed students to register for them, and the claim was that it was generating the sections based on student need, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Faculty and staff were desperately building sections by hand from the choices that the software could allow, moving students around, trying to get classes to run. Those were the rules that we were given. Students were highly upset, and ultimately, they went online for convenience. Few if any returned to campus. At the same time, yes, we needed to get excellent evaluations in the classroom, and learn new tech. I do disagree that the new tech wasn't helpful--it is hopefully making us more marketable to other employers. And eCollege was shut down by its parent company, so we did have to pick a new LMS. In the end, the place was mismanaged into the ground for short-term profitability, key figures got huge bonuses, and the company was thrown away to some venture capital firm. I never passed anyone who didn't complete the work well, and I always gave extra material and effort into helping my students learn what they came to learn. I have given up carrying around my placard that says "The End is Nigh", and am just focusing on getting to a new position. PV has been handed something and they are not going to just throw it away without trying to make it work, or pieces of it. There will be drastic changes ahead and probably layoffs and campus closures. But I can't think about it anymore. I have to just move forward, for whatever that means and whatever it's worth.

I left last year and very gladly. At the end of 2015, I feared the jig was up, and that DeVry would not turn back from the road to hell it had been paving for so long. Remember when their slogan was "doing well by doing good"? (Cringe.) Even then, there was high attrition; students were often ill, intellectually- or emotionally-challenged, and not able to keep up. Yet, they persisted by earning low, but technically passing grades. It is hard to fail a person who hands in work, puts in effort, and yet continues to perform at a substandard level. The only outright failures (and there were plenty) simply didn't hand in enough (or any) work.

At the same time, reorganizations and managers changed swiftly and routinely. There was no discernible logic to firing. Everyone danced daily to keep his/her jobs. New technologies, which faculty had to master (often with inadequate training) became de facto requirements, which were tracked as a criteria of faculty worthiness--and did nothing to improve the outcomes of remedial-adult learners--a central problem, since that was our main cohort.

"Best Faculty Forward" was a cruelly ironic joke, as we were treated with less respect than ever before. All the while, enrollments declined. Weak students with poor negotiating skills lawyered their way through with excuse after excuse, week after week. Faculty had no real authority to set policy--for, in reality, if too many students couldn't meet basic obligations of handing in work on time at a minimally competent level because they were challenged socially, intellectually, emotionally, academically, circumstantially, or in combination, their dissatisfaction was recorded in End Course Evaluations; and faculty were vulnerable to firing. We were pressured to "persist" students, a primary goal.

ECEs were a constant subject of discussion. No consideration was accorded a 3.5 ECE, for example, from an inadequate response rate (1/3rd on average) in a class of 35-40 online students. Negative responses from a very few online students (perhaps only 1 or 2 of those who submit ECEs online) could doom the metric, no matter how unfair the students' perspective. Students in "killer courses" were admittedly unprepared. Yet, such courses and ECEs were compared equally with on-site classes with enrollments of fewer than 10 in courses in the students' major, aligned with their career goals and desires. The playing field was leveled by the metric. That's all that mattered.

We were pressured increasingly to attend conferences and publish, as well as travel extraordinary distances (many commuting 5+ hours per class), and to teach jam-packed online courses, as well as provide service after service locally and nationally.

After years of working 60+ hours a week, serving, publishing, conferencing...I found myself exhausted. And yet, had I glimpsed any hope that DeVry could make the kinds of ethical decisions necessary to really help students, I would gladly have stayed. But, there seemed only to be an on-going enslavement to idiotic make-work, unrealistic commutes, a scraping of the barrel to admit any student with breath, yet no institutional paradigm for actually helping to remediate such students, and the appalling disregard of faculty input....enough.

I believed that students should receive a UNIVERSITY education from any institution that calls itself a university; and that faculty deserve to experience fulfillment in their work, consistent with their degrees and career depth. DeVry believed only that it should make a profit for its stakeholders and has acted accordingly.

Simple: Yes. Sad but true.

This is the post, for those not feeling like clicking the link:

I am a student at Keller in Jacksonville. Since enrolling in late 2015, I have seen onsite class sizes drop from 8-12 students to just two or three. That is, if there is a class onsite. Most terms there are only one or two classes onsite and they keep repeating the same courses. They may list four or five "600" courses, but in actuality, it is the same class, all disciplines in one room. Our campus dean-of-the-month, now six in the last two years, seems powerless in scheduling the courses that the few remaining Keller students need. Our skeletal staff, now down to three people, maybe, is a revolving door. There is now only one that has been there over two years. Our "campus" now consists of only two classrooms on the 2nd floor of a four-story building. Every term Chamberlain claims more territory. Now that Devry and Keller have been culled by AdTalem, Chamberlain will probably evict us soon. Our library has had all books and staff removed over a year ago, there hasn't been any onsite tutors for over a year, and the place is a ghost town at night. A lone security guard mans the front desk. Some students have to drive to Orlando to take onsite classes due to the paucity of offerings in Jacksonville. I am grateful for the onsite professors (all four of them) that I had who cared about us students and fortunate that I only need a few more classes to graduate. I feel sorry or any students who have started their education at Keller in the past year.

With the latest revision to the Keller Catalog, many courses have been eliminated, yet they are still scheduled to be taught online in March and May. Entire MBA programs have been deleted or had nearly all of the core courses changed. It also seems the Project Management Certificate is no longer accredited by PMI and Jacksonville is no longer holding onsite PM classes. I don't think Devry, as it is now, can survive another year. I don't see Cogswell doing anything positive since they haven't even commented on the acquisition (that I have seen). Like some have posted here, I expect Cogswell, aka Palm Ventures, to keep only the online assets and shutter all campuses. Online classes are nothing but chaos. 40 students trying to post six discussions a week, endless quizzes, case studies, and exams. No learning is happening here.