DeVry

The other night, I was out for dinner with one of my smartest and most successful friends, let’s call him Conan O’Brien. As he is British, he refers to the skills and lessons learned during the whole university experience as “qualifications”.

Conan, my smart and successful friend, has issues with his lack of a college education. Despite his obvious skills and confidence in the workplace, he displays the subtle personality trait in that he refrains from ever participating in conversations about any kind of formal schooling. Despite the infamous Bill Gates and Larry Ellison college dropout legends, the lack of “qualifications” for my friend seems to be a psychological threat to Conan.

Now I would have titled this blog “my confession”, but I already did that story . This blog is about my undergraduate alma mater, DeVry University. Now DeVry is informally known (by my friends) as the “1-800 school”. It is resides amongst the infomercials and lore of late-night commercials. But as they say in the Bible “You have…done good to me”.

Ok, so my highly paraphrased Biblical quote may be too edited to be relevant but in this instance, I maintain my right to declare a certain degree of literary license. In the two-years, eight-months it took me to obtain my Bachelor of Science degree, DeVry was the most cost effective and efficienct path to a higher paying job. Regardless of the frequency and candor of my friends ridicule.

When I was young, I always did well in school. And then adolescence took hold of me. Not only did hair start to grow in weird places, my grades dropped dramatically. Throughout the time school mattered, I sucked. I graduated from a school in a town of 1000 people and a class of 83 in a position of…well, I have no idea what my rank was, nor of what the future held.

Being a high-school principal, my dad, Aristotle, was not going to let me shovel roofs during the winters of Minnesota for a living. As I had no redeemable high-school attributes, no school was going to let me in. I distinctly remember my pleading, high-school principal dad, sitting in the living room of our house, begging a sales guy to let me into DeVry. Imagine a 1-800 school and commissioned sales guy, arguing with a professional educator about even allowing me to pay them tuition to let me into the strip-mall-based institute.

But whilst listening to a recent NPR story and in consideration of my experience ,I began to consider a profound concept as epitomized by a quote from this story: ““The name of the school you go to is not going to decide how happy you are for the rest of your life.” Abigail Wetzel, prep school senior”.. And how I can attest to this concept. My friend Conan can even take it further…it’s all about the person.

And one last point. Here is the chart of DeVry’s stock. It worked for me and it worked for its investors.