Pros
- The local faculty and management is definitely better than home office in Chicago. They understand that the course shells are awful and allow us to make modifications to correct mistakes. - The salary for full-time business school faculty is in line with what a clinical assistant professor would receive in the not-for-profit education sector The faculty is being encouraged to get their Ph.D.s
Cons
- The open admissions policy encourages accepting students who are not prepared to attend college at any level. Many students do not understand the need to complete assignments on time (or at all), read the textbook, take notes in class, or study for tests. - The course shells are awful: * Shells are released with mistakes and errors. There is inspection but it is ineffective. Faculty are required to develop shells without reducing their course load or compensation. * Rubrics, assignments, and instructions to students often make no sense. * New textbooks have been adopted, but the tests and assignments require knowledge found in the previous text, but not the current text * Tests often do not fit the course. For example, lab courses where students take weekly multiple choice tests take a final that requires ESSAYS. Huh? * Formal rules about changing the course shell are very rigid and threatening to the faculty. However, the shells are such a mess that management is required to give a wink and a nod to changes. * Management ignores requests for substantial change to the shells. Spelling mistakes are corrected, but no changes to the courses are considered * Trouble tickets on courses are closed when the trouble is referred to the course shell author. Thus, the troubles are considered fixed when they have not been addressed - This is not a place to advance your educational career. Because of the course load (47 credits), you cannot do the research you need to develop a record of accomplishment to get a job at a regular (not-for-profit) institution * There is not enough time to do research and writing in your academic specialty * You do not have enough control over your own courses to do valid instructional research * The faculty manual only mentions research in terms of getting a Ph.D. * The time off for research, if it is allowed on your campus, is completely inadequate * However, research is required. There are no standards. The management does not understand the large effort necessary to product an article, so a conference paper and a research journal article are given the same weight in your evaluation - Faculty cannot complain about courses or anything else in open meetings at the local level. Local management apparently feel that if faculty complain in open meetings, it will undermine management authority and lead to a union. As a result, we cannot bring up problems openly. However, The national dean of faculty does listen to comments made to him, but it is unclear where it goes from there. - The University is firmly in the for-profit bubble. Given the heavy course load, many administrators (and some faculty) have gotten their degrees from for-profit, mainly online universities. The quality of many of these universities are terrible. As a result, they have no idea how poor the education at DeVry is or any idea of the techniques that the not-for-profit sector uses.
