Massachusetts AG Sues ITT Tech For Exploiting Computer Network Students (networkworld.com) 135
alphadogg quotes a report from Networkworld: Browsing through the latest news releases from ITT Technical Institute you'd never think the for-profit school would be capable of the things that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey says the state is suing it for. The school, which boasts of over 130 locations in 38 states, touts its efforts for women in STEM, its donation of laptops to public schools in Indiana and its record giving for United Way. But AG Healey is suing ITT Tech "for engaging in unfair and harassing sales tactics and misleading students about the quality of its Computer Network Systems program, and the success of the program's graduates in finding jobs." ITT Educational Services, however, rejected the AG office's claims and lashed out at the office for the manner in which it has brought the suit. ITT's statement reads in part: "The litigation follows the Office's wide-ranging fishing expedition that lasted for more than three years..." If the state wins, the school could be forced to reimburse students for tuition and fees, though ITT says it will defend itself against the charges.
Retards (Score:5, Funny)
Should've gone to DeVry.
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They did; that's why they were not smart enough to avoid ITT.
I wonder if there is a Trump IT Institute, by the way.
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People might get it confused with a thing that has a brass neck, a big mouth and makes a load, grating noise.
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Should've gone to DeVry.
Might as well have, they're all scams anyway. Even the Ivy leagues are only worth a shit if you happen to party with a rich kid and he likes you.
Re:Retards will miss this (Score:1)
You obviously didn't go there, or you'd know that it's should of.
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An online stadium, of course.
Yup... (Score:1)
In 2002, I had an ITT rep tell me they were fully accredited.
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no it's the one that advertises in every commercial break of every tv show on every channel
Quality education, right there (Score:1)
I distinctly remember setting up Internet access for someone with an ITT diploma on their wall - and having to explain to them how to refresh their IP address. I think the AG may be on to something.
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When I worked at the computer lab at my University I would regularly have to show post-graduate CS majors how to format a floppy disk. Then again I managed to stump a TA by asking, when she requested we fill in a binary number in a register, which side of the register was the MSB.
Re:Quality education, right there (Score:4, Insightful)
When I worked at the computer lab at my University I would regularly have to show post-graduate CS majors how to format a floppy disk.
When I worked the Google help desk in 2008, I had to walk a newly hired graduate on how to turn on his computer. He was shocked to discover that no one was standing around to turn on his computer. I had to explain to him that a cubicle farm wasn't a university lab. I'm always surprised by how little CS graduates know about actual PC hardware.
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That's because CS programs do not teach hardware.
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That's because CS programs do not teach hardware.
If a CS graduate student was presented with a brand new development board, the instruction set manual for the processor, and told to write a C cross compiler on the PC, he would be so out of luck?
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Depends on where they got their degree from.
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Can I at least write it as a LLVM backend, or are you the kind of sadist who’s going to make me implement my own C preprocessor first and work from there?
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That's because CS programs do not teach hardware.
True, but if you're spending four years of your life learning how a particular machine works, at some point you'd think you'd learn how to turn the darn thing on.
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I would hope so too, but some people are pretty stupid...
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I wonder how they do their homework.
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That's because CS programs do not teach hardware.
True, but if you're spending four years of your life learning how a particular machine works, at some point you'd think you'd learn how to turn the darn thing on.
Not exactly. CS program emphasizes on algorithm and concepts (not on programming and/or hardware). Some people do not have a budget to tinker with their machine (or any other machines) in order to learn more about hardware even though it should be a side interest for them from the CS program. However, some (if not most) for-profit schools aren't teaching anything emphasis of the program that at all but rather irrelevant courses for more money.
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That's because CS programs do not teach hardware.
True, but if you're spending four years of your life learning how a particular machine works, at some point you'd think you'd learn how to turn the darn thing on.
Not exactly. CS program emphasizes on algorithm and concepts (not on programming and/or hardware). Some people do not have a budget to tinker with their machine (or any other machines) in order to learn more about hardware even though it should be a side interest for them from the CS program. However, some (if not most) for-profit schools aren't teaching anything emphasis of the program that at all but rather irrelevant courses for more money.
Since when pushing the damned power button on became "tinkering"? DaFuq?
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Maybe he missed that day and was too embarrassed to admit he didnt know how to turn it on for the rest of the semester.
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Seriously. I have this AlphaServer ES45 that I have been trying to bring into this century...and it has been expensive just getting it to boot to the SRM. Nothing at University has really taught me to take on this monster (I mean...maybe...), but I am going to get it to boot properly and consistently to a SSD, then I'm going to tear apart the SRM. Can't boot from anything except the approved devices whose drivers exist in the SRM...on-board IDE was a fun idea, but it turns out this particular chipset corrup
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Sounds like a rather potent machine. My LUG in college had a couple of SGI Octanes (good ones too - one had 2x300MHz and the had 2x600MHz CPUs, both with 2GB of RAM) that I made it my mission to get functional - one of them I had up and running with Gentoo Linux, the other one I taught me to love IRIX once I got it working. Learned how to setup netboot and a netinstall server getting them running (the external SCSI CD-ROM Drive was super slow, and I never did get Linux to boot locally, only was able to ge
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Mmmmm, nice! I had a similar experience way back in the day (around 1999) a guy in my LUG had some DEC Alpha stations to unload from his job.... I was all over that, getting Redhat on them, networking etc. School was slow and dull by comparison.
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That's because CS programs do not teach hardware.
Depends of the university (and the student). As a CS, I never had a class showing how to design circuits or a chip. But I certainly learned about basic circuits, logical design, computer organization, hardware architecture. Depending on the instructor, some of the CS students would actually build custom embedded systems with sensors and shit. Others, we just program existing ones, but we still had to show an understanding of how everything is supposed to work. Plus, we were (and are) expected to have a good
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He was shocked to discover that no one was standing around to turn on his computer.
I've once seen a computer lab where youdidn't have to turn on your computer. That was back in the late 90s when the computers were suns and they expected people to also telnet in, so the computers were always on.
Since the switch to PCs, I have literally never seen a lab where someone came along to switch on your computer.
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Since the switch to PCs, I have literally never seen a lab where someone came along to switch on your computer.
The computer labs I've been to always had the PCs turned on and students weren't allowed to turn on, reset or turn off PCs. Someone, either the instructor or the lab monitor, had to fiddle with the PC.
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Many years ago I worked with a mainframe that had no on/off switch. You had to go to a different computer and have that computer issue a command to the mainframe to turn on or off.
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The leftmost. Not even IBM with their (IMHO) illogical big-endian design* change that order.
(* bits are numbered from the most significant to the lowest so bit 0 is the MSb - makes extension of registers "fun")
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Of course, but back then I spent idle hours reading BYTE articles comparing different CPU architectures, and they always made a point of showing the MSB/LSBs flipped on little- and big-endian machines. Doesn't matter in a register, but I didn't know better. Then again, a post-grad TA should know what I'm asking and why I'm asking it.
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It may be prettier when all the bits are in order, but it's not necessarily the best way for a CPU to process those bits.
This used to make a significant difference on old CPU's, where having the lowest byte first meant you could start some types of calculations before having read the highest byte from memory. I don't think it makes much difference nowadays, but it wasn't illogical when they first though of it.
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I have never met an ITT graduate before and for the most part, the few people I know who have tried ITT were... well... rednecks. This is not meant to be an insult so to say... and these are people I love like family. But they have p
What about "the everbody a coder" push (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems half the government needs to be held accountable for taking advantage of students
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In fairness to the government, they are trying to delay the inevitable realization by the masses that there is no perspective for them and the inevitable collapse that will follow.
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And Walmart should not be allow to pay dividends approximately equal in value to the amount US tax payers are required to pay their employees in welfare and food stamps.
And legal limits should be set on interest rates that can be charged by predatory operations like check cashing places who prey on the weak.
And grocery stores should be required to stop wasting so damn much aisle space on shit like Corn Flakes when they s
School counselors steer you to empty classes (Score:2)
How about how school counselors care more about making sure classes get filled up than making sure you're on a career path that makes any sense whatsoever for anyone at all, let alone you?
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How about how school counselors ...
School counselors? I believe they are actually sale reps because they get a commission per student they can enroll...
ITT is definitely worthless... (Score:3)
Mere shoddiness they can probably get away with, schools don't have any general duty to not suck; but if it can be demonstrated that they were falsely advertising the goods they were pushing, nail 'em to the wall.
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With legitimate educational institutions there may be a year of wasted funds. Students who are going to flunk out are allowed to do so. Places like ITT do not have rigorous courses and have ince
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Something funny about you're post (Score:4, Interesting)
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The plague of markedly-worse-than-community-college-but-much-more-expensive 'schools' really ought to be extirpated go
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I'd like to see a bit more white hot anger out there among folks. I don't think conse
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Hmm... I feel compelled to say this but I really shouldn't have to.
I'm okay with a business not being shut down so long as they don't break the law. I'm not in favor of them just arbitrarily shutting shit down (or jailing people) unless they've broken a law.
So, it wouldn't be inaccurate for me to say that yes, yes I am okay with that. I don't like it and would seek to change the laws - if I had the power to do so. But, I'm pretty sure there's no "sleazy, bullshit, I don't like you" type of law out there. We
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https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
It should be pretty easy to prove.
Attended - a first person perspective (Score:5, Informative)
The 2002-2004 class materials were a joke.
Textbooks for some classes were sourced from India and had dozens of obvious errors.
The C++ class was okay, but could have been much better.
Overall, I would give these quality scores:
Operating Systems - F
Mathematics - C
C++ - B (Asian professor, accent was a distraction - "mammary leaks" discussed in-depth)
Linux - C (didn't cover configuration as much as it should have)
Group dynamics - B
Other core classes - B
It was definitely not worth the $30k I paid, although being "Validictorian with a 4.0" may have opened a door or two.
They wanted me back for a BS, but not with that quality and cost. 90% of the technical knowledge I have is self-taught.
If anyone wants to research that travesty of an Operating Systems book, it's NIIT product code IT103-OpSys-SG-01.
It does not have an ISBN number, but I did retain a copy.
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same AC
The capstone was decent, but not from the provided resources.
The people involved actually worked well together as a team.
The task was to create an application with defined requirements. We did 2 hours/day in-class, then met up at another guys house every weekend for 8-10 hour coding sessions. The professor was oblivious to the outside work thinking we'd fail. We completed an application with installer and documentation. Almost every requirement was met. The team self-organized in an Agile-like way (b
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The OS class was definitely fraud if it was considered to be accredited.
I could have taught a better class myself while in high school.
If there's a place to send that book, I'll be glad to mail it over.
Accreditation has minimum standards that must be met.
The marketing of ITT is impressive.
It's the only school I've ever heard advertising on shortwave radio.
Re:Attended - a first person perspective (Score:5, Informative)
I attended during 2001-2003. In my campus the C++ teacher was Asian. I was a class of one taking CEET about half way through. The CAD program dropped down to about 3 people, and the programmers had 3. We all had to take our academic classes together at some point. The people in the programming course would always make jokes about "mammary leaks" and "C Press Press". There were other jokes, but I've long forgotten what they were.
Otherwise I agree with your assessment. It's overall a slightly above mediocre school in some respects, but I don't think it's worth the price, especially since I would see people with mental disabilities who had no mental capacity to do the work, be in these programs and get pushed along all because they had money.
Also, when I started I was doing 4 days a week for classes and they decided half way through they could cut that down to 3 days a week! That went over well with everyone. Their response was that if we didn't like it, we could leave, and they'd get to keep the money that we paid up until that point anyway. The three days I did go were longer, but I still ended up missing about 2 hours a week from my core classes.
ITT at one time did have a good reputation and that was because the education was actually pretty good for a tech school at the time. They rode that reputation into the grave, dug it up, pissed on, reburied, and repeated multiple times. The sad part is, in my local area, ITT is still one of the better tech schools for EE's. I get to deal with the new crop coming out of tech schools and they're all way more dumb than I was when I graduated. It's a scary thought. The people from ITT still have a slight advantage over the other schools, but being slightly better than a pile of rubbish isn't a goal post people should aim for.
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My friend who used to work for ITT Corp told me that ITT Corp removed itself from ITT Tech -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] (History) -- in 1999 due to their down fall in education. The ITT Corp did not want their reputation to be destroyed by being involved with ITT Tech. Maybe it is true?
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C++ - B (Asian professor, accent was a distraction - "mammary leaks" discussed in-depth)
Please, lets ignore the accent issue. It doesn't prove bad teaching, just that the teacher learned English in a different place than you did.
I attended and graduated from MIT. One of my professors had a thick accent and it was distracting. He also had a Nobel prize.
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Atteneded in the Chicago area about the same timeframe.
Can corroborate that they started with Microsoft training materials in some classes. Then switched to stuff copy-pasted by some Indian printer.
Had teachers whose english was shoddy, at best. Received tests worded in english so broken I couldn't understand the problems I was asking to be solved.
I concur on the OS portion. They were giving classes where we'd load Windows on our removable hard drives, then in another class, they'd have us blow away the
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90% of the technical knowledge I have is self-taught.
I went to a state university and that's about the same for me. I'd put the percentage a lot higher for self-taught things that I actually used for work.
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Oh that one's easy. Just wait in line at the DMV. It's a wonder satan himself hasnt shown up there half a dozen times already.
Re: im sure theres a very simple explanation (Score:2, Interesting)
Having been the first person in my family to go to college with parents who knew zero about quality of education and pressured me into going to ITT because it was local, I can assure you it wasn't as obvious to me 15 years ago.
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Ditto for me. I was the first person in my working class family to go to college and had zero help in figuring out what college to choose, what major to choose, how things worked with colleges, etc. Neither my parents nor anyone in my neighborhood knew fuck-all about things like accreditation or how your university's reputation effects your job prospects in the white-collar world. All they knew was that DeVry had great ads on TV promising a bright future. I actually had to struggle to convince my parents to
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Nearly the same here. My father attended a technical school at one point and was fairly on the ball about things in general, so he could see why DeVry or ITT wouldn't be a good idea for the first generation of the family who had a shot at getting bachelor's degrees.
On the other hand, my family understood nothing about higher education. My brother and I got pushed into going to a state university which really isn't known for much of anything. It has a nice campus, but that's all it has going for it then a
REally they only do it now? (Score:4, Informative)
ITT Tech has been doing that for DECADES. They always lie through their teeth about placement rates. Cripes back in the 90's they claimed 95% of ITT tech students work in the field!
Note: running a cash register meets their definition of being in the field for EE and CS.
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Note: running a cash register meets their definition of being in the field for EE and CS.
I had several friends who graduated from a public college in CS. Both got jobs out of college, worked 7+ years at the same company, got laid in the dot com bust in 2001, took a six-month vacation while collecting unemployment benefits, and discovered that their job skills were so obsolete that no wanted to hire them. The only job they could find was being drug store clerks, and they're still drug store clerks today. ITT would have been cheaper for them.
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Well if they got laid they are doing better than 99% of CS graduates.
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Well if they got laid they are doing better than 99% of CS graduates.
Uh, no.
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The rules on crappy college advertising changed in the past... 5ish years. Sometime during Obama's administration. The laws were changed so that for-profit colleges in general, and ITT like ones in particular, had to have better information on how unlikely it was to be worth it. Right about now is the first time people could have enrolled and gotten totally screwed, give or take.
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Commercialized education sucks... (Score:5, Interesting)
It really is no surprise at all. Happens to traditional universities all over the planet as well: As soon as they think they can get rich on tuition or money from the state, they try to enroll as many students as possible and then waste their time with education quality going down the drains. An excellent example for a field where capitalism does a lot more harm than good.
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When the state pays into the university for educating its citizens, its called socialism.
When university's do what they can to make easy money its called capitalism. But at least they are motivated.
Regardless of the value for money, the issue is that they are failing to deliver quality education.
Be it socialism or capitalism at fault, a company that fails to deliver on its promises should be held to account. This is the first step.
If all schools of all levels were held to account, perhaps the US education s
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You are certainly right that the "socialist" model (although it is more "infrastructure" in nature) does not enforce accountability either. But the capitalist model actively discourages accountability, as ripping off the customer maximizes profit. And you miss one extremely important factor in education: Personal integrity of the educators. In the "infrastructure" model, they can compete on quality, in the capitalist model anybody insisting in quality will be eliminated as a cost factor.
Stupid students. Just sad. (Score:1)
They should have gone to Trump university.
So much more classy.
All the diploma feature a gold rim, and a facsimile signature of the Donald himself.
Think about how much this is going to be worth on eBay in a couple of years!
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True. Too bad my pithy comment has been downvoted.
Never been prouder for a downvote :-)
Refunding tuition? (Score:2)
Would be a good starting point for a gone berserk educational system!
Novell anyone? (Score:1)
Bummer. I slacked off in high school and didn't go to college. ITT's "network engineer" certification took me through Novell's CNE classes and exposed me to technology I wouldn't otherwise have access to. It got me in the corporate door at a time when distributed systems were just taking off. Really wish I'd gone to college, though. Could have been at Google instead. Now I'm just another reasonably compensated generalist avoiding the move to management.
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Could have been at Google instead.
If you want to work at Google, get a job with a contracting agency. I done several contracts for Google in help desk support and building out a data center. The only education I had was a A.A. in General Ed because I skipped high school and later went back to get a A.S. in Computer Programming. Google only cares about college degrees when it comes to hiring engineers and managers.
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Oh yes.. I remember my community college (NOT ITT!) experience with Novell's educational materials.
The books? Giant outlines with precisely zero actual literary value. Just an outline of the lecture topics. Not worth the paper they were printed on.
The networking implementation itself? Not bad in concept, but the implementation had serious issues.
for starters, the requirement that every object in the NDS tree have an administering object can be circumvented with a simple arrangement: Two user accounts that
Screw ITT Tech .... (Score:4, Informative)
My ex-wife wasted a huge amount of money getting a student loan for ITT Tech, after they convinced her she could graduate with an electrical engineering degree there and get a great job.
None of the credits earned there transferred to other colleges or universities, for starters. The courses she took were mostly a joke. I learned the same basic electronics skills in my high school electronics classes. (Here's how you read the color bands on a resistor. Here's the basic definition of voltage vs. amperage. That sort of thing....)
At one point, because she was pregnant, she took a semester off. When she tried to return, they announced one of the courses she needed as a requirement to graduate was no longer available and they wanted her to take a different track, taking several more classes to get to the same place.
At that point, she bailed out on the whole thing, and then they put her in collections almost immediately, despite her making repeated contact with them trying to work out some sort of payment arrangement for what she still owed.
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I learned the same basic electronics skills in my high school electronics classes. (Here's how you read the color bands on a resistor. Here's the basic definition of voltage vs. amperage. That sort of thing....)
Just so you know, not every high school HAS electronics classes where they would learn resistor bands and whatnot. In other words, your high school like many Slashdotters high schools, was tech-privileged.
re: high school electronics courses (Score:2)
I realize the electronics classes I took in high school weren't available everywhere. I was impressed that my public high school offered those AND a "power tech" class where you had a real auto garage space where you could work on cars. It was a pretty typical high school for the area in every other respect.
My point was more that you shouldn't be paying ITT Tech course prices to have some instructor teaching you the most basic concepts of electricity and what basic components are called/look like. If you re
I was an instructor at ITT (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, I taught as an adjunct instructor at ITT for three years from 2001 to 2004 teaching Linux.
It had some good points and bad points. Some of their classes were quite good, others were mediocre. The dean was great and supportive. The equipment was good, the building was nice, and the hours were reasonable. The biggest problem was that there were WAY too many students there who had no business being in college [of any kind]. They had no technical aptitude and it was obvious they were there solely because they had government loans or GI bill and thought "tech" was a road to land a money job.
I kept my sanity by focusing on the few people in each class (of typically around 20+) that DID have aptitude. There were people there for whom ITT did great things (and usually the only ones with A's or B's in my classes).... but the majority were clueless and ITT fought hard to keep those people from failing. I was not afraid to give poor grades for poor work, but the administration would occasionally interfere on behalf of a student, saying they should have more time or another chance, etc.
What finally caused me to leave was that I wrote the entire curriculum- syllabus, handouts, assignments, classwork, quizzes, and exams for two entire courses and taught how I felt it should be taught- making Linux interesting and exciting while still imparting practical skills. Then, after years of people saying my class was the best they had ever taken at ITT, the mandate from Corporate came down that everyone would have to teach strictly their "professionally designed" curriculum- using outdated books, really outdated distros, very boring assignments, confusing exams, and complete with mandatory PowerPoint slides we are supposed to use in class. I told them "Sorry, you hired someone with many years of Unix/Linux experience to create and teach classes. You can hire anyone off the street if you just want them to teach this poor quality coursework." And left before the changes took place.
It was an interesting experience that I don't regret and I do hope helped some people in the process. It gave me a great appreciation for teachers- something I certainly could never do full-time.
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I fucking hate everything about the economics class though. That teacher had an obvious agenda he flogged constantly, and wouldn't stop talking about his pet theories about deficit spend
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Why do we force teenageers to go to college where they usually can't do anything but fuck up?
Nobody forced me, what they did was indoctrinate me. I felt I had to go to college as soon as possible to avoid being a loser. Turned out it would have been smarter to wait a while first, do some other stuff.
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I've always been pretty pro-college, but as my kids get to that age and college is stupidly expensive, I've changed my tune a little. People should consider what they want to do and see if college is a cost-effective way to do it. Sometimes they answer is yes, or college is the ONLY way to do it, but they days of going to college to figure out what you want to do may be over. It's just too expensive for that.
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Exactly my experience as well.
I left a strict Mormon household to go away to college... I discovered a world I never knew existed. I didn't even come close to graduating... but I had a lot of fun!
I came back and went into the general workforce for a number of years before I tried school again.
When I did go back, I graduated 2nd in my class.
Strip mall schools make me wince (Score:2)
I would say that the average person who goes to one of these will primarily learn
What is a "computer network student" (Score:2)
Is it someone who learns directly from a network by imbibing WiFi signals or something? Is this about that Linux kid IBM was always talking about in their ads?
Should have happened 15 years ago. (Score:2)
If memory serves, this is one of the places that advertised heavily about what a great industry to get into IT was during and after the dotcom boom busted. That really told me all I needed to know about them.
For-profit education strikes again... (Score:2)
ITT Tech and DeVry have never been good places to get a solid education. Now that that's pretty well known by most people, they're enrolling the people who don't know or are so desperate that they'll try anything to get a better job. It's no surprise that these schools would try to take advantage of a vulnerable population. I'm not saying universities get free passes on this either, because I've seen lots of students who graduate with a $150K BA in Art History and wonder why they can't get a job. But the fo
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