Pros
When I started with the company, promotions came fast and additional responsibilities were quickly added. Benefits were great. We had annual picnics to the local zoo & water park, Christmas dinner included a small bonus with a nice meal. Vacation times were graduated, and increased with time in company. Tution was free for myself and family. After 10 years, you could expect profit sharing of 2X 1/10 of your annual pay. Very cool! Employees really cared about the students - and we really tried to take care of them. It was challenging, and management gave you the flexibility to effect the changes to make a difference. The time frame I am referring is about 2 - 5 years after DeVry went "public" (sold stock).
Cons
Fast forward to today. Cost of medical has gone up a lot (much more money), and to keep our current cost this year, we had to release medical information to an outside agency AND sign away any legal avenue if they lost them. That is right! We were given the choice of either complete a survey (accurately) with all of our medical information while haolding the 3rd party TOTALLY harmless, or pay significantly higher medical insurance costs. What a deal! Tution is still free for me, but cost 10% for family. Employees once could borrow books for the term and return them, but that has been taken back as well. DeVry has raised tution costs so high, it's actually CHEAPER for my family to go to another college!!! Employees, Staff, & Faculty are forced to buy ebooks at the same cost of a hard back book. Way to make the students feel like the're getting taken care of. I've heard SOOO many complaints from students about the ebooks, and I have to say, I agree with them. Profit sharing after ten years is now 1X 1/10 your annual salary. No real pay increases for nearly 10 years. No more company picnics, no Christmas dinners, no more Christmas turkey. Admissions office has revolving doors installed as they go thru more employees than any other department. The big push is on SALES, sales, sales. If you're not selling the product - say automobiles, do you hire more salesmen / women? Well that's what DeVry is doing! Corporate management likes to surprise us with projects/new standards/mentally insulting training. It truly is a sight to see and is laughable if it weren't true. We no longer put the student first, it's ALL about the stock price and I mean ALL ABOUT THE STOCK PRICE. I have become ashamed to say I work at DeVry where I once was proud. We are pushing the electronics programs to the wayside to allow room for (wait for it) business school degrees. Wow, way to carve out a niche market. We also are bringing the online classes into the resident classes and the students are NOT HAPPY about it. We think they are trying to blur the lines between the resident and online classes. If management could, we would totally emulate University of Phoenix, but then there's that pesky accreditation we'd have to give up. Oh well. We also used to get $2000/year for outside training (job related). That's gone too. It's been replaced with - you guessed it, online training. Now there's a degree or certification waiting to happen: NOT! Corporate office bring in new blood, that have NO previous experience actually doing real work and they're put in positions where they out rank campus employees. Their job, call campuses every few days to to check on task/project dujure. The project are always involve the tearing down of a working, time tested system at a campus with a new company wide standard and 20X the cost. Ironically, the management in Chicago don't even follow the basic things taught in the Keller classes. They honestly don't know what their doing. Just get the stock price up - JOB ONE.
