I graduated from DeVry University a year ago, and while I don’t take offense to anything the Onion has to say about my school, I would like to add some commentary to this subject.
It is true that schools like DeVry University and ITT Technical Institute don’t offer the type of top-notch, all-encompassing education that most of my peers and colleagues have received. But it is also true that education is only one contributing aspect to success. There were students at DeVry that I would never want to work with professionally, but I would imagine that is the case no matter where you go to school. Sure, it would have been easy for me to get a crappy technical job coming out of school. But I chose to do the work to find the best job possible and work my butt off to hone my skills during the entire process.
As you probably have guessed, I work in a computer science and software engineering industry. For a long time, I was not proud of my education because I didn’t graduate with a computer science degree from a classic 4-year university (DeVry doesn’t offer a comp-sci degree). But by the time I had figured out what I wanted to do with my professional career, I had already flunked out of college, become frustrated with blue collar jobs, and joined the military. At that point, I had a full-time job and a fiancé; I needed to work and get a degree at the same time. It took me almost over 4 years of weekend matriculation at DeVry (with a 1-year pause for a stint in Las Vegas) in order to get my bachelor’s degree. Most of the students I attended with were in similar situations as myself. We were adults who needed a technical degree to be taken seriously in our fields. Most of us were smart, hard-working professions who already worked in the industry in some fashion.
After graduation, I started writing up my résume and looking for a professional software engineering job. I was a little bit unsure about how my DeVry degree would reflect, but to my surprise, not one interviewer asked me where I got my degree. No one asked about the curriculum or asked about my grades. I never even got to brag about my cum laude status. It was just a box that needed to be checked in order for me to be qualified for 90% of the jobs I wanted.
Now that I’ve had some experience in the professional field of software development, I can see where DeVry’s education has benefited me in many ways. Although I wasn’t required to take courses in differential equations or calculus, I was required to learn the basics of the software development business. Almost all my professors at the school were actively teaching and working in software development simultaneously, giving my education a very hands-on flavor. There was no mention of binary operations or memory allocation, yet I had courses in systems analysis (which was one of my hardest and most valuable courses), IT project management, web development, and database design / implementation. I was left to learn the interesting bits about computer science by myself, and luckily I’ve been blessed with many smart mentors that have been happy to spread their knowledge.
The point I want to impress with this post is this:
For the first time since I’ve graduated, I can say that I am proud of my alma mater. They helped me develop the tools I needed to be a successful software developer, which was my goal in attending in the first place.
So when I read the Onion article about DeVry University, I laughed.
