Y’all are so cute.
WhyNot, my father is an engineer and a lifelong handyman. Just another example to show that there’s not necessarily a huge divide between the kind of person who likes to design systems and the kind who likes to do the building. He says he would have been bored being a technician as a career, but in his spare time, his hobbies are along the lines of fixing a radio he found in the trash.
Wow, it’s like you know me. New College students–DO NOT DO THIS. TAKE CALC I.
UPDATE:
Year one at DeVry’s Advantage Academy is almost done, and we couldn’t be more pleased. He has friends at school! Actual friends, whom he hangs out with after school playing ping-pong in the rec room! Wheee!
And his academics have improved significantly, far more than I could have hoped for. He’s pulling all A’s and B’s, in honors and college level courses. When I read his papers, he’s writing at a far higher level than I thought him capable of, and far better than my own classmates in college. He’s actually excited about going to classes, and begs me not to schedule anything (doctor’s appointments, trips out of town, etc.) that will make him miss school. He’s challenged and blossomed, and I couldn’t be happier.
He IS considering a BS from there after all, and at this point, I’m letting him make his own choice about that. I’ve given him the information y’all shared with me here, so he’s at least informed. If getting a DeVry BS is the wrong choice, it’s still his choice to make.
Surprisingly, he really does enjoy the Network Systems Administration portion of the project, and he’s really good at it. He and one other student just placed top in the state for Cisco’s NetRiders contest! He says they were trashed at the National level, but since most of what was in the contest hasn’t been covered in his classes yet, he’s just fine with that, and we’re very happy with his accomplishment in taking the state level.
His current goal is to get an as yet unspecified degree, and find some sort of work with the DOD as a civilian contractor. He’d love to go into the military itself, and he’d be really good at it, but his medical history precludes that. He’s still not certain exactly what he wants to do, but he’s working on it. I’m so proud of him. 
Fantastic! I’m so glad to hear it!
DeVry USED to be an excellent place to get an education. This stopped being so in about the early 90s, when DeVry just slung open it’s doors to anyone. I knew a lot of people who went to DeVry in the 80s and got excellent jobs straight off.
The thing you have to realize is computer degrees are not what they used to be. Many jobs are being outsourced. I know this first hand. They can hire someone in India much cheaper. You can do graphic design anywhere. You can have a MIS guy in India walk a clerk through a networking job.
I know I used to do networking for hotels and now they don’t hire me. They hire firms in India and the secretary hooks up the networks just fine. Yes, I have seen this. Usually the job isn’t perfect but it works, which in this economy is all that matters.
If you’re thinking of going into anything into computers ask youself this:
Can this job be done via a phone or Internet connection from India or Ireland or wherever
If the answer is yes, that job will be outsourced and you’ll have wasted your time.
I can name you example after example of this. I have a lot of computer skills and am out of work now. I go to a temp agency which will hire me out for minimum wage sweeping floors or something like that and guess what? You got it, seems like the boss, remembers something about me being a “computer guy,” and I should fix their computers or set up a network or something.
So companies now get comuputer people for minimum.
So remember as home computers become more advanced, the skills used there will transfer over and the computer guys, so to speak become less valuable.
WhyNot, I’m glad your son is doing so well at DeVry. You were pretty much correct in that anything is better than CPS. But do whatever you can to dissuade him from getting his Bachelor’s from DeVry.
I’ve grown up in the Chicago area, went to college in Chicago (Illinois Tech, near Comisky Park) and have worked 10 years in the computer industry in and around Chicago. I know the schools in the area and I know the employers in the area. DeVry is on on everyone’s shit list. There are much better schools in the city for a similar cost that will look so much better on a resume.
DeVry doesn’t offer true engineering degrees. They are “engineering technology” degrees. That is a big difference and employers know it. In fact, true engineering schools like Illinois Tech (I don’t use the IIT acronym since too many people confuse it either with ITT or the India Institute of Technology) and U of I won’t transfer any credits earned at DeVry.
You say its his decision to make, but he’s just a kid who is exposed on a daily basis to DeVry’s marketing. As a parent myself, I try to steer my kids away from what I know to be bad decisions. College is very time consuming and expensive. I’d hate to go through all that time and expense just to find out what I have at the end is pretty much worthless.
If I were in his shoes, I would shoot for UIC. It is a commuter school with easy access via public transportation and has a very respectable computer science and engineering program. And being a state school, it is much cheaper than one of the private schools like The University of Chicago or Northwestern or Illinois Tech.
I’ve worked with a lot of people from UIC and always enjoyed it. They are very competent do their jobs well. The couple of people I worked with who had “degrees” from DeVry have been great to hang out with, but were seriously lacking in technical knowledge that required me to go back and fix a lot of what they did.