From a FORMER Student at Dade Medical College. By Geniusofdespair

 Read it here or there.

I have made the decision to withdraw from this school after having been enrolled for 8 months in the Ultrasound program. I foolishly chose to ignore the poor reviews that I had read before enrolling, assuming that because the school will enroll anyone with a pulse, the reviewers did not have much experience being students and weren't necessarily pulling their weight - I was quickly proven to be mistaken.

I attended the Homestead campus, and began to have reservations as soon as I began my first pre-requisite class, which was College Math Principles. Though the Professor was qualified and dedicated, he could only do so much with a 2-week curriculum and we were forced to skip several chapters at a time and were assigned random pages and sections for homework. The syllabus was written so that it would be rather difficult to fail the course, and attendance and participation were weighted more heavily than actual course work or tests.

This 2-week nonsense is how nearly all of the pre-requisite classes are structured, and I really don't know how the College gets away with it. The Professors for these courses are talented and dedicated, but it is a waste. On more than one occasion, I would walk into the bathroom and see a nursing student confiding in one of these individuals about their misgivings regarding the school and the quality of instruction in their core program. I knew something further was amiss when I one day counted the students in class with me and realized that there was over $750,000 sitting with me in the room that the school was collecting from our loans, and shifted uncomfortably in my small, folding metal chair and gazed somberly at the unfinished floor beneath my feet, reflecting upon the fact that the bathrooms were in a state of disrepair and were usually not stocked regularly with toilet paper or paper towels. Where exactly was our money going?

I noticed that they had enrolled a girl who could barely read or speak properly in my Anatomy class, and she struggled badly before being forced to drop out. Many of my classmates could not speak English well enough to make themselves understood, and also struggled impossibly with the fast paced instruction and ridiculous amounts of material that were expected to be understood and mastered within one day of each other. Some of the professors, though they obviously know the material, speak English so poorly that it is almost impossible to understand them. I would look to my hispanic classmates for clarification, but they too were lost. Nearly every test that was proctored was riddled with spelling mistakes and were at times nonsensically worded - the same goes for the Powerpoint Presentations, which at times provided information that was either blatantly incorrect or outright offensive. Whomever was responsible for creating the slides would sometimes include memes that illustrated offensive examples of a scientific/medical concept with memes stating "Straight men don't cross their legs" and "Women should not drive" in the Ultrasound program to demonstrate beam steering or angling.

A huge red flag was raised when, one day, without warning, we were informed that the school had not paid the lease on the building in which we were located, and that the next day we would be expected to re convene in the building down the street where we would have to be packed in with the nursing students. Again, where is our money going? There were constant problems with the air conditioning system in the buildings (both new and old), where either they were not working and it was stiflingly hot, with students desperately fanning themselves, or you could freeze to death in there and could nearly see snowflakes.

Once I started to realize that the core Ultrasound classes were not really teaching me anything and that I hadn’t actually learned anything in months, I expressed interest in the nursing program, which is also the direction some of the professors were steering me towards. I initially agreed to switch over and pay an extra $183 per month out of pocket because the program is so expensive that the federal loans don’t cover it. Once I sat through orientation, I knew that I had made an even bigger mistake once the proctor started rattling off that it would be an extra $100 for this website, and that book, and certain things weren’t included, and that you were basically going to be unable to work at all while still expected to pay an extra monthly fee, so I finally withdrew and am running full speed back to the public colleges. With passage rates of around 13% for some of the campuses, it is absolutely not possible to justify the expenses. I can clearly picture people reading about these places in the future, reading with disbelief at the way modern Americans have been shaken down and taken advantage of by big business and deregulation. Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” comes to mind, please avoid this school and any others like it at all cost! Now they tell me that they won’t even release my transcripts until my balance of around $10,000, with ballooning interest, is paid off. What a waste of everyone’s time!