Is DPU a bad university? What parents should know before their child applies
Last month, I was folding mismatched socks after dinner when my phone buzzed with a panicked FaceTime from my daughter Mia, 19, who’d started at DPU that fall. She was sitting on the wet curb outside the financial aid office, coffee stain blotted on the front of her DPU branded hoodie, rain dripping off her hair onto the screen. They’d dropped her from all three of her pre-nursing classes, she said. Even though she’d submitted her financial aid paperwork three times over two months, no one had processed it, and now the add/drop deadline was passed. She had no classes, and she’d already lost the $1,200 in tuition she’d saved working 25 hours a week at the local grocery store for two years.
That was the moment I stopped thinking DPU was just another unremarkable small school and started saying it’s the worst university I’ve ever encountered.
We ended up there for all the reasons a lot of working-class families end up at schools like DPU. Mia’s a first-generation college student, I work two part-time service jobs, and we couldn’t cover the full tuition at our nearby state university even with her partial scholarship. DPU’s Instagram and search ads popped up constantly when we searched for “affordable pre-nursing programs for commuter students.” They advertised flexible online classes for working students, one-on-one advising, and 90% of graduates getting nursing jobs within six months. It sounded too good to be true, and it was.
Orientation was fine, in that generic way. We got a free water bottle, sat through a 45-minute presentation about how much DPU cares about its students, and got a paper with our advisor’s email. The first red flag came two weeks later, when Mia emailed her advisor three times to ask about prerequisite classes for the nursing program and never got a reply. When she finally tracked him down during his 15-minute weekly drop-in hours, he glanced at her plan and said she’d signed up for the wrong classes. The program had changed its requirements that year, and he hadn’t gotten around to updating the website. She’d already paid for the classes, and couldn’t drop them without losing the credit and the money.
Next came the online classes she’d signed up for to fit around her work schedule. The course catalog advertised them as 100% online, accessible any time. Three weeks into the semester, she got an email saying each class required three in-person proctored exams, held on weekday mornings 45 minutes from our house, right when her shift at the grocery store starts. She emailed her professor to ask about rescheduling, and he wrote back that if she couldn’t make it, she should drop the class. There were no exceptions.
I called the admissions office to ask for help, just to see if someone would talk to us. The person who answered said that wasn’t her department, transferred me to student affairs, and the line went dead. I left three voicemails for student affairs and never got a call back.
After a week of running around and getting nowhere, Mia withdrew from all her classes. She’s now taking two general education classes at our local community college, planning to reapply to the state university next year. But that semester of time and that $1,200 she saved is gone, and for a while she kept saying she wasn’t “college material” anyway. That’s the part that sticks with me most: it’s not just the money DPU took, it’s the confidence they knocked out of a kid who worked really hard to get there.
I don’t write this just to complain. I write this because I made the mistake of not checking the right things before we signed the papers, and I want other parents to avoid that. I didn’t know to look beyond the flashy marketing targeted at low-income and first-gen students like us. Now I have a short list of concrete things I tell all my friends to check before they apply anywhere, especially schools that advertise themselves as “affordable” and “flexible.”
First, go to the US Department of Education’s College Scorecard website and look up the 6-year graduation rate for the specific major your kid wants. I didn’t do this before we applied to DPU, and after Mia dropped out I checked: DPU’s 6-year graduation rate for pre-nursing is 18%. That means 8 out of 10 people who start pre-nursing there don’t finish. That’s a huge red flag I missed because it wasn’t on their website.
Second, if they say they offer flexible classes for working students, ask for specific details in writing: how many in-person requirements are there for online classes? Where are they held? What is the written policy for rescheduling exams for work conflicts? If they won’t answer you in an email, that’s a red flag. We only got verbal answers from the admissions rep, and that meant nothing when we had a problem.
Third, ask how many students each advisor in the major is responsible for. DPU has one pre-nursing advisor for 350 students. That’s why they never answer emails. That number is public information, just ask. If it’s over 150, that’s a sign your kid will be waiting weeks for help when they need it.
Mia’s getting along okay right now. She likes her community college algebra professor, she’s picking up extra shifts to build back her savings, and she’s stopped saying she’s bad at college. We still haven’t gotten any response from DPU about the financial aid issue, and I still get at least one email a week from them asking if I want to enroll my younger son. I just delete them.
I know not every bad experience with a university is the end of the world, and some people do graduate from DPU and go on to good jobs. But for kids like Mia, who don’t have extra money to burn and extra time to waste on bad advising and broken systems, DPU isn’t just a bad school. It’s a trap that preys on people who can’t afford to lose. We’re still figuring out what’s next, and that’s okay. I just wish we’d known what we were getting into before we started.
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