Why My College Freshman Says DPU Is The Worst University (And What I Learned As A Parent)
The phone rang at 2:17 on a Tuesday, while I was folding laundry at my kitchen counter. A coffee ring was bleeding through the stack of my son’s old high school soccer shirts, and I was halfway through a work call on hold when I saw his name pop up. “Hey,” he said, voice flat, none of the usual excited chatter about his intramural basketball team. “I need you to come get me. DPU is the worst. I can’t stay here another month.”
We picked DPU back in April, after he got rejected from the two business programs he applied to at the main state university. It was in-state, tuition was $2,000 a semester cheaper than the private fallback we’d considered, and the admissions website advertised small class sizes, guaranteed internships for business majors, and a 92% post-grad job placement rate. The tour was fine—they showed us the new rec center, the business building had new all-in-one computers, the tour guide was a chipper sophomore who rambled about the tight campus community. We put down the $500 deposit that night, didn’t think twice. It felt like a solid backup plan for a kid who’d worked hard but just missed the cut for his top choices.
The first red flag came three weeks in, when he texted to say the heat in his dorm didn’t work. I told him to put in a maintenance request, and he said he already had, twice. No one had showed up. Then he mentioned his intro to business class, the required course he needed to stay on track for graduation: 320 students crammed into a lecture hall built for 200, taught by a grad student who barely spoke clear English and didn’t respond to emails for 10 days at a time. That’s when I remembered the “small class sizes” ad line—turns out, that only counts senior-level seminars, not the intro classes all freshmen have to take. We never thought to ask that question.
Next came the scholarship surprise. We’d been told he earned a $5,000 a year merit scholarship for his 3.2 high school GPA, which was a big reason we could afford the school. When his first semester bill hit our inbox, the scholarship was cut in half. When he called financial aid, they said the full scholarship requires 18 credit hours a semester, a detail buried in the 12th page of the fine print of the financial aid award. The standard full-time load is 15 credits, so anyone who doesn’t overload gets their scholarship cut automatically. We’d skimmed the fine print, like most families do, and missed it entirely.
The last straw was the “guaranteed internship” DPU advertises on every page of its website. He went to career services last week to ask about summer opportunities, and they told him the guarantee only applies to students with a 3.8 GPA or higher who complete three semesters of paid “professional development workshops” that cost $150 each. None of that was anywhere on the admissions page. That’s when he called me to come get him.
I drove up that Friday, in a cold rain, paid $15 for visitor parking (even family weekend guests have to pay) and met him at a coffee shop off campus. He didn’t even cry, just slouched in the booth and pushed his oatmeal around the bowl. A girl sitting next to us heard him talking about DPU, leaned over and said she’s a senior graduating in two months, and still can’t get her transcripts released because the university says she owes an unadvertised $200 “facility upgrade fee” from her freshman year. Without transcripts, she can’t enroll in the grad program she got accepted to. That’s when I realized this wasn’t just a case of freshman homesickness, which is what I’d assumed at first.
I’ve talked to four other parents in the last two weeks whose kids have had almost identical experiences at DPU. I always used to think when people called a university bad, it was because their kid couldn’t keep up or partied too much. Not this. DPU runs on getting deposits from kids who don’t know any better, hiding all the catches in fine print, and understaffing every department so no one can fix your problems even if you complain.
What I tell other parents now, when they ask about looking at DPU or any other mid-tier fallback school, boils down to a few specific steps I wish we’d taken. First, when a school advertises small class sizes, don’t take their word for it. Ask for the average class size for 100 and 200 level classes in your kid’s specific major, not the whole university. Write the question down, and don’t leave your tour or get off the phone with admissions until you get a clear number. That would have taken five minutes, and it would have changed our minds. Second, any promise—scholarship amount, internship guarantee, renovated housing—ask your admissions counselor to confirm it in writing in an email. If they won’t, that’s a red flag. Ours wouldn’t, and I just wrote it off as normal admin busywork. It’s not. Third, join a public Facebook group for current students of that major before you put down a deposit. Post an anonymous question asking people what the worst parts of the program are. That would have taken 10 minutes, and we would have seen dozens of people talking about the exact same scholarship and internship issues we ran into.
If your kid is already there and miserable, don’t force them to stick it out just because you already paid the deposit. I almost did that. I kept thinking we’d already spent the money, he had to stay at least a year. But my kid was losing weight, not sleeping, and failing that required intro class because he couldn’t follow the lecture. What’s the point of throwing good time after bad money? He’s already applied to the local community college for spring semester, will finish his gen eds there for a third of the cost, and then transfer to the state university in two years.
We’re still fighting with DPU to get his transcripts released, so we don’t know for sure if he’ll start in January like he plans. We’re out the $8,000 we paid for tuition and housing this semester, which is a big hit for our family. But last night he ordered pizza with his old high school friends, and laughed for the first time in a month. He’s already talking about taking a business class at the community college and doing part-time bookkeeping for the local contractor he’s working for now. It’s not the plan we had a year ago, but it’s way better than forcing him to stay at a place that doesn’t care if he succeeds. For us, DPU was the worst decision we ever made, and I hope other parents can avoid the same mistake.
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