How ITT Tech Screwed Students and Made Millions (gizmodo.com) 334
An anonymous Slashdot reader shares "a grim story about a company that screwed poor people, military veterans, and taxpayers to turn a profit." Gizmodo reports:
By the time ITT Technical Institute closed its doors earlier this month, the for-profit college had been selling tenuous diplomas at exorbitant prices for more than 20 years...burying low-income and first-generation students in insurmountable debt, and evading regulators since the early 1990s...
ITT collected $178 million over two years just in federal education funding for veterans -- even while the company projected 33% of its students would ultimately default on their loans -- and last year 70% of the school's total revenue came directly from federal financial aid programs. Gizmodo spoke to one student who "will now spend the rest of his life paying back loans for a degree that is practically useless," after compounding interest turned his $70,000 loan into $200,000 in debt. "Like all of the former students interviewed by Gizmodo, he was placed in a job that did not require professional training" -- specifically, a game-testing position that didn't even require a high school diploma, while ITT "placed" another student in a $5.95-an-hour telemarketing job. Her assessment of ITT? "It was totally worthless."
ITT collected $178 million over two years just in federal education funding for veterans -- even while the company projected 33% of its students would ultimately default on their loans -- and last year 70% of the school's total revenue came directly from federal financial aid programs. Gizmodo spoke to one student who "will now spend the rest of his life paying back loans for a degree that is practically useless," after compounding interest turned his $70,000 loan into $200,000 in debt. "Like all of the former students interviewed by Gizmodo, he was placed in a job that did not require professional training" -- specifically, a game-testing position that didn't even require a high school diploma, while ITT "placed" another student in a $5.95-an-hour telemarketing job. Her assessment of ITT? "It was totally worthless."
How is this different from any university? (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny how few people call out universities for their bullshit marketing and loan sharking. Is it a Stockholm Syndrome among you geeks?
Re:How is this different from any university? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's exactly what I thought....
"So.... just like our entire higher education system?"
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It amazes me how high tuition has gone. $12k for top tier state schools, and $5-10k for "second tier" universities. Out of state $30k+, private higher still. $30-70k per year with housing.
Bottom line is that it simply is not worth the cost for most careers.
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A lot of it has to do with the states dropping their support of higher-ed. In Michigan, as recently as 2000, 80% of the major Universities' operating budget came from the state. In 2015, it was down to 15%. Costs to educate each student (budget / number of students) has been flat, without considering inflation. Funding sources from outside the state have gone up, but not enough to offset the difference. Consequently, tuition used to cost $135/credit hour for in state, and now it costs $375/credit hour.
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Mostly 'cause my degree costed like 5000 bucks. Our universities challenge your brain, not your wallet.
It's easy to get in, IIRC the financial investment is roughly 500 bucks a semester. Most of it is state funded. You'd assume that everyone and their dog takes that offer? You bet. So the university has zero, none, nada requirement or even interest to hold your hand and carry you through. You make it, great, if not, step aside you're holding the line up. Dropout rates are "insane" by US standards, but it ha
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"Mostly 'cause my degree costed like 5000 bucks. "
I'm guessing U of Appalachia ("Home of the Cookers!")?
Re:How is this different from any university? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, the number one thing is that a degree from an accredited university marks you as middle class and therefore gets you through at least one round of filters for jobs. That works out to a difference in starting salary of about $17,500 more for the college graduate on average, which extended over a lifetime works out to be a big difference, even if you count four years out of the workforce and an average debt of $29000 on graduation. So on average it's a win.
Of course many people differ from average, and quite a few college grads may find themselves below average for salary and above average for debt. People in this category will of course feel very much like you do. An electrical engineering grad starting at around $60K at the start of his career probably won't.
Now there are a number of for-profit universities which have transient adjunct faculties and predatory marketing practices that aren't that different. But I guarantee if you got into an ivy-league school you'd get a very different experience. Or one of those historically Quaker institutions. Or MIT. It's not all the same thing -- although what is available to you financially and academically might not be so diverse.
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The starting salary may be higher but the difference disappear over time, it doesn't last for the whole career.
I remember having this exact discussion with a HR person while looking for candidates for my team. I was surprised by the salaries so she explained that junior people with a degree from a prestigious school started higher on the salary scale to recognize their investment and possible better education but that someone with a community college diploma would catch up within a few years.
This being said
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Well, I've made the same argument to my kids about why they should choose the school that is going to serve them best; that the salary premium you get for that MIT degree goes away when people are comparing track records.
But there is absolutely no doubt that a college education on average is an economic benefit. The lifetime earning of people with a bachelor's degree are 1.66x that of someone with high school diploma -- again on average. Someone who starts out as a tradesman and ends up with a successful
We don't need an 4 year high cost party to get a p (Score:2)
We don't need an 4 year high cost party to get a piece of paper.
We need people with real job skills that don't have to go to 2-4 years of class room with little to no real job skills for hands on fields.
How do you want working the backhoe some one who knows they are doing or someone who was years of theory but never worked one in their years of class room?
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I guess it depends on the industry, but I've been in this one for almost 20 years and anywhere I've been, the best technical people I've met always had either a community college diploma, were college dropouts or even had some vocational school training.
I can't explain it but it feels like those people are more willing to try things, to venture out of their zone of comfort and to deal wih conflict. Meanwhile, the whizz kids with degrees up the pooper sure know a lot of theory and can excel at some things, b
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Reallly, the best people? Like Linus Torvalds (U of Helsinki), Guido van Rossum (U of Amsterdam), Larry Wall (UC Berkeley grad school), Ken Thompson (UC Berkeley too), James Gosling (Carnegie Mellon),or Dennis Ritchie (Harvard)? Those kind of "best technical people"?
I expect by "best technical people" you mean "best at the places I've worked", and I'm guessing they draw from the middle of the deck: people with a university degree and mediocre talent, and talented people with a partial university degree.
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It's the first time I see someone bragging about being a member of the IEEE, so let's see what they have to say about "associate members":
Associate member grade is designed for technical and non-technical individuals who do not meet the qualifications for member grade but who wish to benefit from membership and partnership in IEEE, and for those who are progressing, through continuing education and work experience, toward qualifications for member grade.
So in a nutshell, you're paying them $200 a year to be a wannabe IEEE member. Sounds like a great investment, although I'd personally spend that money at a stripclub, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
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So you have physically met how many of those smart IEEE people? And how long has that interaction lasted?
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We need people who have been exposed to different ideas and know how to think critically and express themselves.
We also need advanced vocational training (e.g. in engineering, business, and applied art)..
These are two different needs that are not always both (or either) satisfied by college. But it's safe to say it works for some people. It is still theoretically possible to become an architect in some states through a ten year apprenticeship, but the paths to most advanced professions include a bachelor
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Well, I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I'm sure many people do. No institution is for everyone. I've known people who've loved working in the military and made a career out of it, and others who did a hitch and were miserable. And it isn't just the luck of where you're assigned -- although that makes a difference. I knew guys who ended up at a desk job in Hawaii and hated it, and others who were infantry in Vietnam and decided to re-up. It's an institution where certain kinds of people thrive and o
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My university years were good for a few things, but major career training was not one of those things.
My university degree, though, was essntial for opening doors.
Every useful thing I learned about writing software I learned on my own -- all the core, and much of the advanced, stuff I learned before I ever set foot in a classroom; all the rest after I started my first job. None of the time between those two points yielded much of anything useful, but all the desirable jobs required a 4-year degree from an
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In my experience, only a small minority of businesses require a degree. Those that do are typically stuffy "must wear suit" places or old school mega corps from the 40-50's
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major career training
College is not on the job training It never has been. It never will be. If you want career training they have those, they're coincidentally called trades.
College will not teach you C. College will teach you the theory behind C.
learned about writing software
Because if a CS curriculum spends any time on how to write software you're in the wrong place. The largest complaint I hear out of CS and Engineering students is they feel like they were sold something else. College is NOT a 4 year degree on how to write Python and C. (or what ever e
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sounds like full sail university the 3rd Most Expe (Score:2)
sounds like full sail university the 3rd Most Expensiive College in America. But it's backed by Mitt Romney
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ITT will pass anybody (Score:2)
Yes, real University's will lie about the real cost of college. My kid
Re:How is this different from any university? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Not for profit doesn't necessarily mean charity either. I work for a nonprofit company and we don't do any charity work (other than the usual fundraiser type stuff that just about every other company does) and we don't take donations or government money either. It also doesn't mean that the services we provide don't yield a profit or are somehow less expensive. All nonprofit basically means is that the company doesn't have shareholders of any sort and doesn't pay dividends to anybody.
We do have a system tho
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All nonprofit basically means is that the company doesn't have shareholders of any sort
Incorrect. A nonprofit does have shareholders. I know. I've been a shareholder in more than one non-profit. A non-profit means that the shareholders can't get dividends (or other payouts of profits), nothing more. A charity can make a profit, but it's not a legal profit" so long as it's held by the company, rather than paid out. A surplus isn't bad thing. It means they are solvent. Nothing more.
All the successful charities are run like a for-profit, where you have lots of accounting and such to ma
Re:How is this different from any university? (Score:5, Insightful)
... or United Way (both often cited as "bad" or "misleading" charities)
The United Way is not considered "bad" just because of where their money goes, but also where it comes from. Every year they run a "Federal Campaign", to collect money from government employees. When I was in the military, each unit had a quota of contributions to collect, and commanders were judged on their ability to collect. This led to a lot of coercion and abuse. Anyone who didn't agree to sign up for a monthly payroll deduction was assigned to clean latrines or given guard duty when everyone else had a 4 day pass. There were privates with families to support, barely making enough to survive, getting their pay docked every month despite needing the money far more than most United Way recipients. United Way collects contributions, skims administrative fees off the top, and then passes the rest on to the actual charities. It is far better to contribute directly to deserving charities, and leave United Way out of the loop.
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Same thing happens in many fortune 500s. Reward for the corporate CEO that collects the most is a turn at the United Way president tit.
Terrible pass through % for a corrupt racket that does nothing.
You can use it to your advantage. Checking if a prospective employer is a 'united way partner' is a quick and easy way to filter out political hell holes. Fish rot from the head down, if the CEO is participating in that racket, (s)he is rotten. So is the rest of the org chart and almost certainly the board.
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Re:How is this different from any university? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the other universities and colleges are "not for profit", i.e. government run so off the hook. They know how to play the crony games with the politicians and bureaucrats.
Even though many are grade inflating diploma mills who graduate students with worthless degrees and lots of debt as well.
Regardless of whether or not a college is for profit, there are a lot of really stupid people out there who don't belong in college at all but go anyways because there's this overall mantra that "you must go to college". Contrary to popular belief, college is NOT for everybody.
I can't tell you how many people I've met that get either completely worthless degrees (i.e. being a history major) or degrees that are legit but are in professions that are over-saturated (i.e. law degrees.) You can get these degrees at what are otherwise good state universities, and, it's not the university's fault if you fail to make a successful career out of it, even though you were (in a sense) doomed to failure before you even took your first class. However we should probably stop sending the message that college is for everybody, lest these people go deep into debt for no good reason at all, and worse, since there's a lot of them, they put upward pressure on tuition costs that make it more expensive for those who should be going to college.
And on that note, I think student loans are a really dumb idea, no matter what college you're going to or what degree you're getting (unless you want to be a doctor, which most med school students I've spoken to said it's just not worth it and if they had to start over again, they'd have done something else.) Furthermore I have almost no sympathy at all for anybody who has a huge amount of student loan debt. Why? Well, if college costs you so much that you have to borrow, you're probably doing it wrong. Community college is dirt cheap, so you should be taking advantage of that for as long as you can.
I personally spent about $14,000 on college, with 75% of my bachelor's degree credits coming from community college, (my graduate's degree is from Northern Arizona University) and two years after graduating I'm already within the top 30% of income earners in the Phoenix area.
Then again I'm also the kind of guy who believes that if you need to borrow money to buy a car, then you're paying too much, so maybe I'm biased.
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Bullshit. It was a diploma mill
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A good, the Icke Crowd add their doubtless well informed view to the discussion.
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The most significant difference is that ITT attempted to allow the plebes into the middle class.
How exactly would that be different from the "plebes" attending community college? Other than that they'd likely spend less money and obtain a degree that might actually be worth the paper it's printed on?
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For Profit, NFP, self taught... I have had good and bad experiences with them. It really comes down to how willing they are to learn after school.
I found For Profit there is less hand holding in teaching on how to use the app but covering theory and concepts are hard.
For NFP the theory and concepts are easier but getting them on different tools and showing them when you need to break the rules gets harder.
Self taught are often experts in some areas however they will have unpredictable gaps in their knowl
Re: How is this different from any university? (Score:4, Insightful)
I found For Profit there is less hand holding in teaching on how to use the app but covering theory and concepts are hard.
For NFP the theory and concepts are easier but getting them on different tools and showing them when you need to break the rules gets harder.
Broken down it's the technicians vs the engineers.
The "For Profit" colleges filled a niche which was the fact that we forgot about the skilled trades in the US. Everything taught at ITT tech is a trade option in Germany. You don't need 4 years of theory you need a hands on approach to learning what you need to know to get the job done.
"Not for profit" colleges are how they've always been, theory based academia. If you don't want to learn the theory and learn stuff unelated ("well rounded student") then college isn't for you, try a trade.
Both are equally important jobs. But they're separate. You don't hire an electrician when you need an electrical engineer and you don't hire an electrical engineer when you need an electrician.
The same applies to computer based jobs. Despite what eveyone says on Slashdot a handfull of "code bootcamp" would do wonders in some organizations. If HR hands me another CS graduate that can tell me the *theory* behind Python's design and not actually write Python I'm going to raise hell again.
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unable to build the simplest of circuits but good at discussing electrical theory sounds like the gap that places ITT do fill.
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I agree that the US has a gap in vocational training. But ITT wasn't really stated as a vocational school but as a college.
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Did someone say DeVry?
This is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't ITT, it's that people think some school (or ANYONE ELSE) will make you successful.
You make yourself successful. Only you.
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Yeah seriously. They did zero research before taking on 70 thousand dollars in debt? And then they relied on the school to "place them" in a job (what the actual fuck?!), and made apparently no effort to find something better than telemarketing? Those people sound completely useless to me, if they didn't get shafted by this school they'd still get taken advantage of by someone else.
Re:This is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Places like ITT give you quite the song and dance when you visit their campus. And "walk you through the process". The simple mistake people make is not getting a second opinion. Are students responsible for their own mistakes? Sure. Is it fair? No. Should we shut down those who exploit other people, that is gain profit without offering something of equivalent value in return? Absolutely.
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Why would anyone with more than 1 brain cell not do some research before visiting a campus?
Now, the faculty were in on the scam, so why aren't the students suing their teachers asses for fraud?
They sought out people who thought that this was their only option,” a former Charlotte campus faculty member says. "[The students] were really trying to make a difference in their lives and trying to make a difference in their families lives," she says, adding that the campus reps saw them as "cash cows".
By the time most students realized how bad ITT was, it was too late. "The credits that they earned couldn’t be transferred anywhere," she explains. "They were stuck. They needed to graduate. It worked out for some people, and they were able to move on. But they were some of the few." (According to a 2012 Senate investigation of ITT, about 52 percent of students who enrolled in 2008 dropped out by 2010.) "I know a con when I see one."
You could not work there and not be aware that you were part of the scam. RICO for everyone involved. Sending 1,000 faculty to jail will send a message to the other crappy diploma mill scams, as well as alert the pubic, which seems to be sleepwalking.
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It's not stupidity, it's ignorance.
How would you know where to research? How would you even know whether research is necessary?
Sometimes, you don't know what you don't know.
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So you never ask anyone before taking on $70,000 of debt? You never buy a new car without asking friends or family what they think? You never ask for a second opinion at the doctors before they cut you up?
It was massive stupidity on the part of the students. Someone studying I.T. must certainly know what google is, at the very least. Searching these schools names brings up tons of complaints. These suckers were willfully blind. Still doesn't change the fact that the faculty is also culpable for fraud, not
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Nice job blaming the victim there. That;s sort of like saying, "It was her mistake to enter a bar and have someone slip her a date rape drug, so the rapist should go free".
Stop and consider that these people are (well duh!) uneducated and often first generation students. They have no one to train them on how to find a decent school. They often don't have a clue as to what questions to ask or how schools are rated.
If exploiting the ignorant and naive is your idea of the proper functioning of a society then y
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Did you get your reasoning skills from a for profit college?
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As someone who's actually emigrated not just once but *twice* I find that your diatribe rings a bit hollow.
For one thing, I think you're taking quite a lot of advantages in your own background for granted that are not likely typical for immigrants from many African or Asian countries.
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For one thing, I think you're taking quite a lot of advantages in your own background for granted that are not likely typical for immigrants from many African or Asian countries.
People who are raised to expect things to be handed to them are at a disadvantage in the real world where you have to go get things. So yeah, what you're saying is absolutely true on one hand, and yet not the whole story on the other. Also, the advantages that we enjoy from our own backgrounds aren't necessarily the types that get you a job. They can help keep you out of prison, and don't think for a second that I want to diminish the value of that, but it's not exactly the same as helping you succeed. Once
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Research skills are taught in college.
Most ITT students come from homes where they are no college grads so such research skill are not available so they need to rely on the marketing as being truthful.
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They use search engines but they don't know how to research.
Search engine will find what you are looking for. Research finds what you didn't know was there.
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Please point me to one person in the past 100 years that achieved success with exactly no education at all and no help from anyone else.
Re:This is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Please point me to one person in the past 100 years that achieved success with exactly no education at all and no help from anyone else.
A successful person doesn't have to be the smartest person in the room. Here's a list of 100 entrepreneurs who succeeded with little or no education, including a half-dozen who dropped out of elementary school.
http://elitedaily.com/news/business/100-top-entrepreneurs-succeeded-college-degree/ [elitedaily.com]
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Here's a list of 100 entrepreneurs who succeeded with little or no education ...
I suppose it depends on your definition of education.
Abraham Lincoln is the first gentleperson on your list and I would submit that he is one of the most educated presidents the US has had. He managed to become educated without much formal schooling, which is quite the accomplishment. This is based on my understanding of the word educated, however.
If you define an education as the transmission of wisdom or knowledge from those who have it to those that don't, I can conceive of few better ways to acquire a
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If your sample size is large enough - eventually you'll collect enough outliers to make an impressive list.
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Wow, 100.. That makes it less likely than winning the lottery.
Students are trained to beat the test (i.e., always having the right answer), which inhibits risk-taking because they don't want to be failures. Students who are already considered failures by the education system aren't afraid to take risks. You can't succeed in business unless you're willing to take risk and hire people smarter than you.
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my credit rating is around 875
That's quite an achievement, considering that FICO tops out at 850. I guess that means you're in the 100th percentile [behavioradvisor.com]. Bravo!
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There are probably a dozen credit rating 'models', and, while FICO is considered one of the more popular, some of them go up to 990 or so, including ones advertised on tv in the UK, so it's quite possible gp does have a score of 875.
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or that's his fako score on creditkarma
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Re:This is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't ITT, it's that people think some school (or ANYONE ELSE) will make you successful.
Eh, yes and no.
You make yourself successful. Only you.
...and mostly no. You have to take advantage of opportunities, but you don't create opportunities by yourself. It's a group effort. Sometimes, others work against you, whether intentionally or incidentally. ITT deliberately defrauded students. Willful fraud is wrong because we know that it's possible to take advantage of people, and when that happens it harms society. It's expensive for all of us when people's lives collapse.
If you go to a school it's reasonable to expect (if not assume) that you're being provided useful education. It might not be moneymaking in itself, but if they promise that it will be, then it had damned well better be. If they are promising job placement, then they need to deliver. If they don't, they're committing fraud, and they rightfully should be held accountable.
Tech schools are mostly garbage, which is sad because if they were any good, they'd be great things. Being immersed in a learning environment solely with other people studying the same sort of things you're studying could be a massive boon for some people, and in some situations. Alas, they are mostly garbage, and you'd do yourself and your community (and by extension, your country) more good by simply going to a community college. They have their flaws to be sure, but they are still better than technical schools on average. They're a fairly poor place to get a good quality education and a degree on the same schedule, because good educators come and go from them somewhat irregularly, but a lot of them have fairly fantastic programs of various types — especially in the applied arts.
The problems with ITT tech equally apply to pretty much any of these technical schools, and they're pretty much all the same deal although they are not all equally sleazy. The automotive institutes are very much the same story; for less money you could attend a community college and actually get a legitimate degree along with a pile of ASE certifications, while learning from people with at least as much experience as those teaching in the purely for-profit technical schools. If you want to become a smog technician or a master auto body tech you don't want to go to a tech school, as they will rob you blind. But you can bang the former out in a couple of years (starting from scratch) and the latter out in three or four and for comparatively very little money by just going to a CC.
We all need help in our lives. Apprenticeship used to be popular, schooling still works... and sure, trial and error is a thing, but let me tell you, it can be more expensive than just going to school.
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From what I've seen, it's mostly yes. I've worked with multi-million dollar company owners, and people working minimum wage. In both cases there were plenty of people who had the same opportunities presented to them. The successful ones took advantage of those opportunities to better themselves (one of the millionaires used the exact idea I had thought of
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Do you always refer to parents as "Mommy and Daddy" or just when you're being a condescending dick?
Only when I'm an asshole (which is why I work in IT).
Re: This is stupid (Score:2)
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The problem isn't ITT, it's that people think some school (or ANYONE ELSE) will make you successful.
You make yourself successful. Only you.
I wonder how you parents feel about that?
Orphan? Legal guardian, then.
Did you learn nothing in K-12?
No college education, I assume, or it was totally useless.
No professor or teacher ever added value to your life.
You were just born with all of the tools you needed to be a self made success.
Have you EVER worked as part of a team...on a project, perhaps?
Did no one other than you do any work?
Have you ever been a part of anything bigger than yourself?
No one does it completely alone. I suspect you ha
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The problem isn't ITT, it's that people think some school (or ANYONE ELSE) will make you successful.
You make yourself successful. Only you.
Wrong.
Watch this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontl... [pbs.org]
The problem is the for-profit "schools" who:
- Admit *anyone* with a pulse, regardless of qualifications.
- Charge tuition that is multiple times what a real school charges.
- Do crap like sending nursing students to a Scientology museum and call it "clinical hours". (They graduated w/o ever being in a hospital).
No that's BS (Score:2)
Are you an idiot? (Score:2)
Christ, what is it with people who can't accept that they can get useful help from other people...
Re:This is victim blaming. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it is victim blaming. People are told to go to university to be successful, so they do. Without a plan. Or, with a plan that they don't realize won't work until it is too late.
I have real sympathy for people in nursing programs that get ripped off: education is required, and it can be a well paying position. People waste their money going to DeVry or ITT to learn CAD and the like; we need to do a better job creating internships for people to learn job skills, and focus university on expanding general knowledge.
Re: This is victim blaming. (Score:4, Informative)
Companies choose to outsource based on two (often realtors) issues: talent availability and cost. Some jobs have a rational pay ceiling; when you exceed this they are ripe for outsourcing.
Suppressing pay is not a noble goal, but if an employer can reduce the education debt that an employee has then maybe the salaries can be kept closer to the break-even point for outsourcing. Maybe we can increase the talent pool as well...
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Personally, I find the victim blaming to be neutral. Employers (myself included) have a stigma against these for-profit schools. We also have a stigma against community colleges for the first few years of school, which is borderline illegal and technically baseless.
There has to be a better way, for the students, their eventual employers, and society as a whole.
For Profit Education is a Scam (Score:2, Interesting)
Unwitting students,
lax regulation,
guaranteed student loans,
PROFIT!!
though one could say the new business model for "non-profit" educational institutions is mirroring the for-profit ones in administrative bloat. The whole thing is about to tumble.
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You used be able to pay for state schools by working part time at retail / fast food level jobs back then.
I find this hard to believe (Score:5, Informative)
That's 29% interest. Who out there is actually offering student loans at 29% interest?
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the dumb fuck put it on his credit card, then cries that ITT screwed him.
As I pointed out in other comment, plenty of people took their ITT degree and have a good job. Why was ITT singled out by the Federal Government when no different than many other places?
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There are explicit rules for the for-profit institutions to gain access to student loan funding form the feds. The one that ITT specifically ran afoul of is their "job placement" claims were basically bullshit. They claimed a 90+% placement rate, but the truth is they couldn't substantiate that with actual paperwork and documentation, and many of the people they could substantiate placing weren't making jack-shit.
The
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I already stated clearly what my interest is. If you are wondering, I did not attend ITT, I never recommended the place to anyone, and I had no financial interest in it. I don't even know if the curriculum was better or worse than other tech schools. I don't know any teacher or administrator or even janitor who worked as employee.
I only know people that went there have job similar to mine that pays pretty well for the area in which I live. I know those people were ok with attending there. Apparently it
Credit Scores Big Part - also Compounding (Score:2)
That's 29% interest. Who out there is actually offering student loans at 29% interest?
The interest rates any bank advertises always have asterisks next to them. The 3% or 5% you see marketed is only for people making certain incomes, with perfect (800+) credit scores, etc.
Someone with lower credit (~600 or under) easily gets a "penalty" of >10%. When they apply, they don't get 3% for a loan, they get 12-15%. Yes, they get sometimes maybe 20% interest. And what are they going to do about it? They have low credit, and no one will do better. Hell, finding the bank that even gives them the 20
Yes, there are plenty of them (Score:2)
We've been gutting education funding for 20 years. This is the result. College really is un-
Commercial "education" generally fails (Score:4, Insightful)
Education is one of the things that if done well requires a high level of skill and dedication from those doing the education. Hence if done well commercially, it becomes too expensive for almost all people.
The solution is to have the state do it and to draw the teachers from qualified idealists and let them do it how they see fit. Sure, this has its own set of problems, but it is vastly better than the capitalist way of doing it, because that does not work at all. The authoritarian way (curricula specified in detail by the state) universally fails nicely as well.
Incidentally, this is that standard situation in Europe and it works reasonably well. It does require a large enough supply of smart, capable, idealistic and non-greedy people though, and that may be hard to come by in the US, especially the "non-greedy" part as US society is pathologically focused on money. With a candidate that ran his own scam of this type (Trump "University") having a realistic chance of becoming the next president, I do not think the future is bright for US academic education.
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That was roughly the situation in the U.S. long ago (at least for lower levels of education), but it was built on the how the culture of the time effectively restricted certain social classes (women) to certain job sets (education), which led to a relatively high number of smart, capable and at least somewhat idealistic applicants for relatively low cost (essentially by forcing greed out of the picture).
This was not, however, a bound relationship, so as the culture changed and employment opportunities broad
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One big difference, "everyone" doesn't get a chance to attend "free" university" in most European countries, it is a meritocracy - poor students aren't coddled with remedial math and English classes. In America, anyone with a desire can find SOME university that will take their federall
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Which is another drawback of education for commercial gain: The providers of this sort of "education" have strong motivation to allow anybody in that can pay. This is not a good idea, as it waters down skill levels and degrades grade quality. A society dependent on technology cannot afford that in the long run.
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I take it you have never actually taught anything, because your "ideas" have no relation to this world. Education beyond rote memorization (which barely qualifies as "education", if at all) cannot be provided cheaply, and, unless we get AI that is both as capable as a good human teacher and willing to work for free, this is not going to change.
I have to post this (Score:4, Informative)
Was this [youtube.com] their ad?
Usenet memories (Score:4, Interesting)
Double Standard (Score:2)
From the /. posting:
At least ITT "placed" them in a paying job, compared to countless tens of thousands of "non-profit" college and university graduates that got no help findi
Caveat Emptor (Score:2)
Before giving away your money, make sure you're getting what you actually need. There are always lowlifes around preying on the desperate or uninformed. This isn't the first time nor is it the last time people will get screwed by these kinds of dirtbags. Protect yourself folks.
To take things old school... (Score:2)
Re: score inflation (Score:2)
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You really think stack-ranking is the solution here?
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Re:Comuter programming redux (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the 1960's, corporations had training programs. The bean counters in the 1980's eliminated everything that didn't add value directly to the bottom line. The cost of training people to become employees got shifted to the public school and colleges. These days you need a college degree to get hired on as a filing clerk.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-increasing-number-of-companies.html [nytimes.com]
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My, how the world has changed in the last half-century!
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similar places also get those
again why the special focus. I'm wondering if someone with government in their pocket had competition removed or wanted to change landscape of IT education for some agenda.
Note I didn't attend ITT, don't know any employees there, had no investments in them nor anything that depends on ITT, don't even know anyone hurt by this since the ITT grads I know already have good jobs
I don't know if ITT classes worse than normal or better than normal, nor the quality of the teachers. Onl
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why not just say will hire H1B's only?