You will regret it…..believe me, my friends and I already enrolled elsewhere.

As an impoverished child growing up on welfare in the inner city of some of the worst slums in America I dreamed. I dreamed of one day of escaping the inner city poverty, condemnation, and crippling low expectations that others of better circumstances of life were forcing on me. What I dared to dream, as a young child, was so much like that of the dreams of millions of other young idealist Americans that passionately believed in what the United States stood for. What I dared to dream was simply the American dream; of success through diligence, determination, integrity, and hard work. Throughout American history, this dream that was responsible, in large measure, for building America, was motivated out of desperation and a passion to succeed. This dream, I believe, is so basic to American existence that it is one of the most cherished and sacredly held value in America. Unfortunately, there are plenty of greedy, unscrupulous opportunistic individuals and organizations that attempt to exploit this sacred American dream by making false promises and selling false hopes at exorbitantly high prices to the poorest and most desperate of the American poor.

Long before the faculty at the University of Bridgeport went out of strike, there were indications of questionable practices at the university. UB’s willingness to exploit the hopes and dreams of young, vulnerable, and innocent people was reminiscent of the worst practices of many “for profit” proprietary schools that exploited the poorest of the poor in their quest for private profits. Back in the early 1980s, the University of Bridgeport engage in a high glitz ad campaign, taking out full page advertisements in the New York Times and other nationally know newspapers, comparing the education received at the University of Bridgeport to the quality of educational available at Ivy League Universities in the United States. It falsely exaggerated the earning power and career success of its graduates. Although, clearly hubris, false and misleading to the more knowledgeable, to the likes of this young person (at the time) and many like me, these very sophisticated and expensive advertisements were stunningly impressive. The photos and physical description of supposedly the school’s campus were equally false and misleading at the time. By looking at the photos used in their advertisement, one was left with the impression that the school was located at a beautiful pristine beach front community that was completely surrounded by a lush forested park.

Little, if anything, of the school’s advertising and recruiting literature was remotely close to reality. While I was a student in the early 1980s at the University of Bridgeport, the incident of crime, including violent crime was intolerably high. I was personally attacked three times on, or near the campus by residents from the low income housing projects that surround the perimeter of the school. During my second year at the school, a man was found shot dead about three blocks from the university campus. It was simply not safe to walk on, or near the campus most of the day. The fear was omnipresent. Adding insult to injury, the career marketability and opportunities claimed to exist for graduates of the school by the university was in, large measure, false. The career planning and placement office at the school was a joke and pitiful. I remember frequently walking into the office and finding no staff at all in the office. After completing my first year at the university, reality about my career prospects began to set in. Things really began to get scary. I remember walking down town Bridgeport and a passerby asking me what university I was attending, and me telling him I was a UB student and his dreadful response. He told me that he had graduated from UB more than a year earlier and was completely unable to find work. This was unfortunately to be an onion in regards to my own future career prospects as a MBA graduate of good academic standings from the University of Bridgeport. I, like many other graduates of UB have graduated to unemployment and perpetual under employment. I had spent years on my career search after graduating from the University of Bridgeport, sending out many hundreds of resumes to no avail. I feel that, as a young innocent and vulnerable person, my American dream was deliberately violated and exploited for the revenue seeking needs of the University of Bridgeport. The school is nothing more than a highly questionable diploma mill.