A leader in the field of for-profit higher education, DeVry has been important not only as a Chicago-area school, but also as a business enterprise operating at the national level. DeVry Institutes was founded in 1931 by Herman DeVry as an electronics repair school, with campuses in Chicago and Toronto. Its main Chicago campus was built on North Campbell Ave., west of the city's Lake View neighborhood, on the site of the old Riverview Park. Between 1967 and 1987, DeVry Institutes was owned by Bell & Howell, the large Chicago-based camera and imaging equipment company. In 1987, when the school was struggling, Bell & Howell sold it to Dennis Keller and Ronald Taylor, founders of another Chicago-based, for-profit higher education chain, the Keller Graduate School of Management. This merger produced DeVry, Inc., with its corporate headquarters in suburban Oakbrook Terrace. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, when it opened its first campus in New York City, DeVry was one of the world's leading for-profit educational enterprises, with about 50,000 students at 23 campuses across the country.

Mark R. Wilson