The following year, the school underwent another name change, to DeVry Institute of Technology. In DeVry was authorized to award bachelor's degrees in electronics. By DeVry had an enrollment of 30, students nationwide. The real success of DeVry during this time was owed to two men who met while working for the company in the early s. Dennis Keller, a Princeton and University of Chicago graduate, and Ronald Taylor, who earned degrees from Harvard and Stanford, were working for DeVry in Chicago when they decided in to form their own postgraduate school of business.
Calling the business the Keller Graduate School of Management, Keller and Taylor at first performed all the work the school required themselves, from moving furniture into a rented school room to teaching and balancing the books. By the end of , the company had a staff of five, fewer than 30 students, and almost no money in the bank.
Unless a new track could be found, Keller and Taylor knew they would be bankrupt within the year. Because the school was unaccredited and ineligible for federal loans many potential students could not afford to enroll, even though Keller and Taylor kept tuition lower than other nonprofit institutions.
So, instead of continuing to compete with such schools as a full-time day school with a traditional student body, the company switched its focus and began offering evening classes to working adults.
By offering evening classes, the school's students had the option of continuing to concentrate on their careers while at the same time attending classes, a formula which has become increasingly effective to a broad range of students over the prior decades.
The new emphasis proved to be quite profitable for the fledgling business: within two years the school was offering M. Accreditation was traditionally a contentious issue between the academic establishment and for-profit institutions. According to Leslie Spencer, writing in Forbes magazine, the "educational establishment has long thrown roadblocks in the way of for-profit schools by withholding accreditation--the seal of approval required for a school to receive student loans and grants.
Any school seeking to make a profit was automatically denied the seal. Being granted accreditation enabled the school to overcome many obstacles: the school's academic reputation automatically and dramatically improved, making competition with other schools more feasible; federal loans became available to the school's students; and, most importantly, the school could offer degrees instead of certificates.
While the Keller Graduate School saw increases in both profits and enrollment in the s, DeVry Institutes was facing just the opposite: after its peak year of enrollment in , the business began losing students as more and more people began looking towards business education, as opposed to technological training, to increase their career opportunities. Keller and Taylor, buoyed by the steady growth of the Keller Graduate School, realized that acquiring the company owned by their former employers presented a unique and somewhat risky opportunity for expansion.
Many analysts in the industry questioned why a small but vibrantly successful company like the Keller Graduate School would choose to saddle itself with a business which, despite being many times the size of the Keller Graduate School, was slowing in growth and losing profits.
Keller and Taylor, however, saw that if DeVry's curriculum could be changed to meet the needs of the modern computer and technological industry, the two schools combined could benefit one another, offering training and educational services to an even broader range of students. However, Keller and Taylor did not have the financial backing necessary to make such an acquisition. Thus, in , the two men approached Citicorp, and a group of insurers headed up by Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, and borrowed the necessary funds to purchase the DeVry Institutes.
Until its acquisition of DeVry, the Keller Graduate School was a Chicago institution, where five of its six campuses were housed. Suddenly, as leaders of DeVry Inc. Such tremendous overnight growth offered not only an opportunity for the Keller Graduate School's expansion, but also presented many organizational and bureaucratic challenges.
Keller and Taylor soon found that they needed to amend the DeVry Institutes' curriculum. They also had to face a potentially crippling debt. To attract more students, Keller and Taylor treated the DeVry Institutes in much the same manner as they had handled the Keller Graduate School's needs: they began offering not only engineering and technical training to the Institutes' undergraduates, but added a business curriculum which complemented the postgraduate programs at Keller as well.
It was not only DeVry's increased growth that saved the company, however. Since then, DeVry's stocks have continued to increase in value, with initial proceeds from the offering being used to pull the company out of debt.
By the early s two things became clear to analysts in the educational industry: students were graduating from high school in record numbers, and, of those graduates, more and more individuals were seeking training in higher education which would put them on a fast track to technological or business-oriented careers. DeVry Incorporated was in the right place at the right time, offering undergraduate training in technical fields and graduate programs for business people.
Moreover, in doing away with such traditional collegiate frills as secluded, landscaped campuses and sports teams, DeVry managed to keep costs low, further bucking the higher educational trend of skyrocketing tuition. As DeVry Institutes was shaped in the late s into a school well-equipped for the needs of both the business and technology student, Keller and Taylor continued to refine the Keller Graduate School's curriculum.
By , the school was offering masters degrees in business administration, project management, human resource management, telecommunications management, accounting and financial management, as well as information systems management.
The goal of having each school complement the other was complete, making Dennis Keller's prediction that "DeVry will be the brand name for our undergraduate degrees and Keller the brand of our postbaccalaureate degrees" a reality. DeVry's positive reputation grew from several sources, the most powerful of which was the fact that a DeVry graduate in all likelihood was not going to be left upon graduation with a degree and no job.
According to DeVry sources, in the s, "of the more than 44, graduates who actively pursued employment or were already employed, more than 93 percent held positions in their chosen field of study within six months of graduation. While tuition was lower at DeVry than at private colleges, many public universities still offered similar degrees for less money. What kept DeVry's enrollment up was the company's promotion of the fact that an individual with a DeVry degree could almost be guaranteed a position in his or her desired area.
Taking into consideration DeVry's flexible payment plans and class schedules, DeVry's steadily increasing enrollment figures, almost every year in the s, was not surprising.
The company did, however, have its detractors. Some in the education industry questioned the quality of DeVry's instructors, claiming that because most of them did not have PhD's in their fields that they were less qualified than professors found at more traditional universities. DeVry instructors were also usually hired part-time, in order to keep costs down, and had jobs outside of teaching, making one-on-one student-teacher interaction something of a rarity on DeVry campuses.
DeVry responded to this criticism by pointing out that their instructors had the most important quality a DeVry student needed to complete meaningful training: hands-on experience in technological or business fields. In the mids DeVry was financially strong enough to consider branching out and in acquired Becker CPA Review, a company which helped students prepare for accounting certification.
By the late s DeVry could claim 16 campuses for the DeVry Institutes, 31 locations for the Keller Graduate School, and an enrollment of over 42, students, making the company one of the most successful and high profile for-profit schools in the nation. At decade's end, DeVry's future looked bright, with plans to open at least one new campus a year, as well as extensive on-line programs being developed to complement more traditional instruction. DeVry University is authorized for operation as a postsecondary educational institution by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.
Nashville Campus: S. Perimeter Park Dr, Ste. Program availability varies by location. In site-based programs, students will be required to take a substantial amount of coursework online to complete their program. Diehl Road, Naperville, IL Give us a call Live chat Agent Available Now. Send us a text Search DeVry. Career Advisory Board In January , DeVry University established the Career Advisory Board, a panel of leading business and academic representatives, career experts and authors who will provide real and actionable advice for job-seekers.
Career Igniter DeVry University, along with Microsoft and CareerBuilder, recently launched Career Igniter , a unique online experience that includes tools and expert advice particularly useful to job hunters in these tough times. DeVry University.
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