Westwood College

As a prelude, I'd like to say that I finished my associates degree through Westwood College in December of 2003. I was taken in by the orientation BS about how jobs would be a plenty by the time we graduated. I did not get my first graphic design job until 2006. Between those three years, Westwood helped me one time directly to find something in my area of expertise. Obviously, Westwood cannot control the ebb and flow of the economy, but they can be more practical and stop trying to sell their courses to naive students with a helping of bullshit. As of now, I am enrolled in a bachelor's degree for web design and multimedia. The online sessions are convenient, but because financial aid charges you more to participate in part time classes, I chose to go full time foolishly believing the curriculum would be formulated for people with full time jobs and families. This was not the case and is my first gripe with this program: 1. Online Degree: If you're going to market the convenience of an online degree, at least respect your clients to the point of making it so the classes can be completed during a 40 hour work week. Some of us do not have time to read through 300+ pages spread between three classes with homework and discussion posts, and still get a decent grade. These were also not for core classes, which are more important than general education, which brings me to my next point... 2. Lack of Choice: I could not choose which general education classes to take. This akin to buying an album off of Itunes and then Itunes telling you which songs they're deciding to give you with the album. Westwood gets plenty of money to be able to offer students more of a choice in which classes they want to take. 3. General Education: The Gen Ed classes available from this program are horrendous. If I'm taking a bachelor's degree program, I know what I want to focus on, but classes like "science fiction", "statistics" and "public speaking" do not help me in my development of my graphic and web design skill sets, and the fact that these classes include workloads that match or outdo the core classes lead sme to believe Westwood is stuffing their programs with unnecessary classes in order to charge students more money. 4. Curriculum: The curriculum recently changed, however, I have no idea if they've updated their outdated methods of teaching. For example, CMS platforms like drupal, wordpress and joomla are quickly becoming key elements for a lot of businesses, yet none of my core classes taught any aspect of these besides a discussion of what is the best CMS to use for a client. Even considering the fact that these are built upon languages such as PHP, these classes do not teach students how to use these languages. In conclusion, I went into the program thinking I would learn something. I learned most from my Digital Photography class and maybe a few others, yet everything else felt like a waste of time and money. So for the TL;DR version: Don't do the Web Design and Multimedia program, find a community college and take classes that don't waste your time and money like Westwood does.

I graduated a year and a half ago and still have not found a job. Westwood didn't help try to find me job placement, I'm eyeball deep in student loan debt and found it to be a big waste of my time and now money. Now they have a promise that they advertise that states that they will help you pay back your student loans if you don't find a job after graduation...what a joke! Now I have a degree, debt that I will never be able to pay off, and the same job I had before college. Nobody wants to hire me in the design field because of my lack of real world experience.

DON'T LET THESE GUYS FOOL YOU FOR 44,000 DOLLARS FOR A ONE YEAR SCHOOL I'VE COMPLETED THIS SCHOOL AND WAS NOT WORTH IT I HOPE THE STAFF AND CEO GET WHAT THEY DESERVE BACK TO THEM. DON'T THEY KNOW THAT SCAMMING PEOPLE IS WRONG!!!!!!!!!

Unaccredited degree program. Credits cannot be transferred and are not recognized by most or all other schools. Should not be called a College. I am now in major debt with a degree that is worthless - even with my GPA of 3.97, I never even got an interview through them.

Very poor institutional ethics....money hungry. The school is not student focused at all. The career center is a joke A TOTAL WASTE OF FEDERAL DOLLARS!!!!!