Vantaggi
Sullivan provides its staff with superb training. You are treated as a professional with your own office space, phone number, email, etc. You are able to connect with other departments, and due to the high turnover rate you can find new opportunities easily. The schedule we had at the time was flexible.
Svantaggi
You will see many reviews here saying that Sullivan has nothing to offer its employees. That is not true. However, the majority of issues that are expressed on Glassdoor are accurate. The university does use predatory tactics to push students into programs that are not beneficial to their success. Senior leadership and the office culture promote an environment of guiding students to their correct program. In reality though, Admissions Advisors and their supervisors are threatened with punishment if they do not hit their enrollment numbers. These two realities cannot co-exist, as staff face the choice between employment or pushing students into academic programs.
Sullivan does have programs that excel in certain areas. The Culinary and Baking programs, as well as the Allied Health programs, truly showcase the best of what the university has to offer. There is also no large-scale bureaucracy to deal with at Sullivan like there is at public universities. Despite this, Sullivan does not have the resources to take care of its students. The university operates on a skeleton staff, with departments losing more money each year. The university also has very poor career outcomes. I myself had many students come back and complain that their degree could not help them in the real world. Since Sullivan is private, for-profit, there is very little help from state-sponsored scholarships or institutional aid. Students are often supporting themselves through loans, leading to life-altering debt.
Where Sullivan really falls short though is in its relationship with employees. While I was employed at Sullivan, I witnessed coworkers receive threatening emails that were paragraphs long explaining how terrible they were as an employee. This is not an exaggeration. I was baffled to see how critical leadership could be of someone it had just hired only months prior. The turnover rate is also incredibly high, and has not changed despite Sullivan changing its Director of Admissions, Vice President of Enrollment Management, and its President. No matter who the Board hires, the environment remains the same. This environment borders on harassment, intimidation, belittlement, and bullying.
One such instance of this environment is when the university laid off its staff at the Lexington location. Some of these staff had just been hired only weeks before the announcement of this layoff, showcasing uncoordinated decision making. These employees at Lexington were given approximately six weeks to find employment before they were laid off. This seemed generous and fair considering the university was facing financial struggles.
When the same layoff came to the Louisville location, however, none of the staff were given notice. Those that were fired were fired immediately and escorted out by Public Safety. Some of these staff had been with the university for over twenty years! It was a huge shock to the community. The President at the time held a meeting to discuss these layoffs, and then mysteriously resigned a week later after being put on leave.
The week after the layoffs we were told in Admissions that we did not sound happy enough when talking to prospective students on the phone. I was told that if I wanted to keep my job then I needed to not ask questions, keep my head down, and try to be unnoticeable. This did not work, and within months I lost all of my coworkers in the office. I myself sought new employment as I was being threatened with a write-up for my performance. When I asked specifically why I would be given a write-up (my daily numbers were almost always perfectly aligned with expectations), I was told that leadership would find a reason to explain my drop in performance. It did not matter that the majority of the Admissions office did not meet its goal, leadership was determined to punish staff who fell short and replace them with new employees.
I write this review not to encourage leadership to change (they won’t, they are aware of these reviews and refuse to consider their genuine critiques), but to discourage any professional from working at Sullivan. After finding new employment, my friends and family have told me that I am happier, look healthier, am more positive, and more engaged with my life. So, to any person looking to be employed by Sullivan, stay away. Even if the pay is lower at other universities in the Louisville metro, you will have better benefits, a better work/life balance, and a much higher chance of job security.