Why DPU Ended Up Being The Worst University For My Kid (And What I Learned As A Parent)
I hefted Lila’s 40-pound mini-fridge up the third flight of uncarpeted stairs at DPU’s freshman dorm last August, my shirt sticking to my back and my knee throbbing from an old run injury. The hallway smelled like stale citrus cleaner and leftover pizza, and Lila trailed behind me, silent, instead of chattering about how she was going to arrange her fairy lights like she’d done all the drive up. Her new roommate texted to say she’d gone out for lunch with her high school friends, so we had the room to ourselves for an hour. I tried to make small talk about how close the dining hall was, how beautiful the oak trees were on the quad, but Lila just nodded and taped up a poster of her favorite national park without meeting my eye. I left that day with a pit in my stomach I couldn’t name, but I pushed it down. We’d gotten a $10,000 annual scholarship here. It was close enough to home for emergencies. It had an environmental science program, which was all Lila ever wanted. What more could we ask for?
The first six weeks went downhill fast. Her 101 intro bio class had 620 students, she told me, and the professor lectured from a 10-year-old PowerPoint and never responded to student emails. Her assigned advisor was a research professor who advised 72 undergrads, and it took three weeks to get a 10-minute meeting where he just told her to “pick whatever classes fit the requirements” and sent her out. The mental health center, which the website advertised as “top-tier student support,” had a six-week wait for any non-crisis appointment, which didn’t help when Lila’s roommate’s boyfriend moved in halfway through the first month and never left. When she put in a request to the RA, she was told there was no policy against overnight guests, and they couldn’t do anything unless he damaged property or threatened someone.
The 2 a.m. call came mid-October. I fumbled for my phone, saw Lila’s name, and heard her choking on sobs, saying she was sitting in her old Honda in the parking lot of a grocery store off the highway, she couldn’t go back to the room. I threw on sweatpants, grabbed my keys, and drove the three hours up to pick her up. We stopped at a 24-hour gas station halfway back, got her a hot chocolate and a pack of her favorite gummy bears, and she said what I’d been afraid to hear: “Mom, DPU is the worst university I could have picked. I hate it here. No one cares if I pass or fail, or if I’m even there.”
I’d spent the whole lead-up to college telling her that any school is what you make of it, that we were lucky to get the scholarship, that she just needed to give it time. But sitting there in the harsh fluorescent light of that gas station, I couldn’t say that. I remembered when I graduated college, I took a boring corporate job because everyone said it was a good opportunity, and I stuck it out for 18 months because I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake. That mistake set me back two years in the career I actually wanted, and I still regret not leaving sooner. So I didn’t tell her to stick it out. I said we’d figure it out.
Over the next month, as we sorted through transfer options, we realized how many corners we’d cut when we picked DPU. We’d fallen for the big scholarship, the pretty campus on the tour, the marketing that said their environmental program was top-ranked. What we didn’t do: we didn’t wander the department when we toured, we just took the pre-planned admissions tour. We didn’t ask any current undergrads in the environmental program how their experience was, we just talked to the admissions rep who told us what we wanted to hear. We didn’t check the four-year graduation rate for the major—turns out it’s 38%, almost 30 points lower than the state average. DPU spends more money on marketing and building new admin buildings than it does on hiring faculty or supporting undergrads, and that’s not just a bad fit—that’s just a bad school for undergrads.
I’ve talked to half a dozen other parents in our area whose kids transferred out of DPU in the last two years, and almost all of us made the same mistake: we prioritized cost and name recognition over student support. Now, when other parents ask me for college advice, I give them three concrete things to do before they commit, no exceptions. First, when you visit, don’t just go to the admissions tour. Go to the department your kid wants to major in, find an intro class that’s not arranged for prospective students, and sit in the back for 20 minutes. If the class is more than 100 people and the professor doesn’t know any of the students’ names, that’s a red flag. Second, email three current undergrads in the major (the department will send you contacts if you ask, or you can find them on the college’s Instagram page for the major) and ask three direct questions: how long does it take to get a reply from your advisor, how many of your classes are taught by grad students instead of full professors, and how long did you wait to get a non-crisis appointment at the student health center if you needed it. If two out of three give you answers that sound like “forever,” walk away. Third, don’t let a big scholarship blind you to bad signs. An extra $10,000 a year isn’t worth it if your kid has to spend an extra two years to graduate because they can’t get the classes they need, or they end up dropping out entirely because they’re miserable.
Lila transferred to a small regional college three hours south this January. She got a smaller scholarship, and we have a little more in student loans than we planned for, but most of her credits transferred. Last week, she texted me a photo of her 12-person intro ecology class, with her professor standing next to her group as they tested water samples from a local creek. Her advisor replied to her email about fall registration in 90 minutes. She goes on a hiking trip every other weekend with the school’s outing club, and her roommate’s boyfriend only stays over one night a week, and the RA helped them set up a guest agreement that works for both of them.
I still see DPU advertised all over local parenting groups and college fairs, with that big scholarship money front and center. I still get messages from parents asking me what I think of the school, and I tell them straight: based on what my kid and half a dozen other kids I know went through, DPU is the worst university you can pick if you want an undergrad degree that actually supports you. That doesn’t mean no one has a good experience there, I tell them. But the odds are stacked against you, and it’s not worth the risk. We’re still adjusting to the new plan, still working out the extra loan payments, but Lila hasn’t called me crying at 2 a.m. in four months. That’s enough for me right now.
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