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Tech Training Schools Going Bust
superflippy writes "The Associated Press reports that many tech training schools which opened during the last few years are now shutting their doors. During the dot-com boom, there was the perception that a few months of computer training could lead to a fabulous job. Now, it seems all these schools have produced are unemployed people with student loans and dubious certifications."
Outsourcing to India
Cheap College Grads (Although there are too many here also)
Experienced (more expensive) College Grads
And *maybe* a few scraps left over grads of these half ass tech schools
There is still definitely a place for a few of these schools for people wanting to add a skill or become more advanced in a skill, but the days of taking an 8 week course and then finding a tech job are over. I actually know a couple of people that went to these type schools 5 years ago and now have great tech jobs.
at least they are unemployed with only a few months worth of student loans.
seems downright enviable from my position with four years worth of loans.
lysergically yours
Funny, that doesn't seem to stop them from running ads that say "40,000 new IT jobs are opening up every year! Train now for a rewarding career!"
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
They shood do what I did and go to an acredited scholl like the University of Pheonix. Online.
During the dot-com boom, there was the perception that a few months of computer training could lead to a fabulous job.
Perception? How soon we forget - that actually happened. It happened all over silicon valley.
We'll have another unsustainable tech boom as soon as everyone forgets those mistakes entirely.
I am a professional HTML software developer with good working knowledge of Microsoft FrontPage 2000, Microsoft FrontPage 2002, Microsoft FrontPage 2003 and HomeSite. Extensive experience with back-end server management via Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard. I am looking roughly for $80-90K (plus sign-on bonus and relocation), but I can tell you the job field is not that great. I think I should learn PHP and wait for things to pick up. Can anyone recommend good PHP classes under-$5,000 range?
Now, it seems all these schools have produced are unemployed people with student loans and dubious certifications.
;)
So, kind of like Microsoft?
[rimshot!]
Thanks, I'm here all week!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
1. Kid goes through course
2. Kid does well, but doesn't really learn
3. Kid gets job $63,000/year
4. Kid has no idea what to do, but was able to talk his shit up.
5. Kid goes to teacher and begs him to help
6. Company pays teacher to do kids job $15,000
Cost to company $75,000
I know of this personally. Pretty annoying if you ask me. The kid actually still has his job too.
And that is exactly why these schools are as successful as they are.
Or, is today opposite day?
Well if we thin out the population of tech schools some, the more reputable colleges (in my case Cal Poly Pomona) will look a little better, and that degree will mean more. Therefore maybe IT degrees will mean something again...well we can hope anyways...
...in bed
A friend of a friend asked me to help him with a final project for one of his classes at ITT Tech. This was a project in ASP for an online bookstore. He was nearing completion of his associates degree in Web Design, and when I got there to show him things, he knew nothing at all. Not even HTML... When I asked him about that, he said he "sorta learned it a while ago". Last I checked, HTML was the staple of Web Development, no? All of his pages that he had made so far were all autogenerated by FrontPage. Goes to show you what good a $30,000 2-year associates degree at ITT Tech is worth.....or rather worthless.
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
Well, no, I'm not really shocked :)
Disclaimer: several bachelor's and master's degrees work for me, as well as several no-degree people with strong skills, but as far as I know, no "certificates", which is the way I like it.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
These schools churned out tons of useless "educated" people with little added value from their educational experience. The only purpose that these institutions had was to dilute the talent within the IT and computer engineering fields. I say good riddance!
I spent 10 months at "The Chubb Institute" gaining a certificate in Network and System Security. During the 10 months, we started with basic A+ cert type information, and worked our way up through Linux and MS ISA Server... none of each in enough detail to actually get a job done.
In fact, we spent 1 week learning Redhat where we installed the OS, Installed Samba, and FTP.
Then we spent 4 weeks (5 hours a day 5 days a week) learning how to write resumes and interview.
Somehow I feel like Linux is more important then what color my suit is for the interview. (blue vs. grey)
Lastly, they promised "Job Placement" - however, the only calls that the Graduating Security Class received were helpdesk positions.
My question is... if the Network Security class... the most esteemed program at the Chubb Institute is getting calls for Helpdesk positions... what positions are the helpdesk classes getting?
Janitorial?
I mean seriously - I was a director-level IT manager at two multi-national companies over the past 12 years, and neither I, nor any of my peers, would even think about hiring someone from one of these tech schools.
Even the smallest amount of real-world experience was far more useful than several months of training at these schools. Sure, they learned a few rote solutions, but I can teach those to a new recruit who shows a bit of intelligence in a short time.
In fact, for an entry-level position, give me a liberal arts grad with a bit of tech knowledge learned on their home computer, and I've got the makings of an excellent eomployee. People who can read, write and converse are better candiates than many of the "tech school" grads I ran into.
Frankly, I never felt these schools were worth anything, and if they are now closing, all the better.
I used to work for a small computer training center. I got to teach people on worker's comp how to repair computers (fun when they were just there to collect the check and didn't care about the class).
Basically, they were told by their rehab people that our three-month class would get them a nice 40K a year job, and they usually got really pissed when they found out otherwise.
Speaking of the original dubious certification, a 8-year old just got certified as an MCSE.
I would wager that the schools who are not doing well and forced to close their doors are the same ones running the ad's that state there are a ton of IT jobs,and then take $18,000 from you to learn test questions. But places like Globalnet and the likes who ACTUALLY teach real world use still thrive. If you don't believe me feel free to contact them and ask why they have to turn away students because their class is full. So this is a good thing in my mind. Let the schools who charge obscene amounts of money to learn the test questions go bankrupt, because the ones who teach real world experience will always be here.
**It runs through my veins like radioactive rubber pants! Do not deny my veins!**
This is from an Air-Force perspective, so think what you will:
The military is based around taking people who know very little and teaching via tech schools. We do quite well. We can take someone with virtually no computer knowledge and turn them into a basic sysadmin in about 6 months. Within 2 years, the cream will rise and those are quite impressive. Of the rest, some will transfer to administrative (paperwork) jobs and be promoted. Others will get out and become a burden to AT&T or WorldCom. But the system DOES work.
The main difference between the military and the commercial world is that we actually care about our people. Where your company provides very little in the way of mentorship, I will nurture my people till they find their sweet spot. Some will learn from books I reccomend, others from college I allow them to attend during working hours. More still will need me to hold their hands and walk them through tasks until they catch on.
Most civilians see coworkers (you call them cow-orkers) as competition. That's why a lot of good sysadmins will never develop after their civilian tech schools.
You and your company may see on-the-job training as a waste. Well, you are missing out on a lot of good people. Instead of a college grad demanding $50k+, you could look to the sub-$20k market of tech-school grads. Give them some training. Promote those who deserve it, fire those who screw up.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Finally I'm starting to see some justice! I have 18 years experience but have been out of work due to all the outsourcing and dumping of jobs overseas for the last 10 months. Nothing has ticked me off more than seeing so called private schools like ECPI and others advertising in the paper for IT and Cert courses. They advertise like there is a shortage for jobs, that they cant fill them fast enough... when all they have done is dumped untrained memorizers on the market and created a glut of available personnel. And if a business or HR department doesn't know better, the fancy paper gets these really untrained workers the jobs at cheap salaries (because they have to pay those 30K college course fees) I wish they all would shut down and go back to just being Testing centers like back in the Drake days... or am I showing my age again.
In my experience the better tech people are the ones that grew up playing with the stuff as a hobby, not the ones who heard that there are money/jobs available in the field and then sign up at a tech school. I'm not going to cry for the tech schools. Go get a CS degree instead.
We're a start up anticipating developing a product and being bought out by Cisco, Microsoft, HP or someone else with deep pockets. We offer your choice of stock options by the roll: White Cloud or Charmin.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The downward spiral of recent years, beyond anyone's direct control: 1) The economy going to hell 2) The resulting layoffs 3) People with years of experience competing for entry level jobs 4) A lack of entry level jobs (why hire someone fresh out of school when you can hire a former sysadmin for Dell tech support?) 5) Companies not paying nearly enough as they used to for tech positions This is not the schools' fault. A previous poster used the term 'dubious certs,' and this is completely accurate. The problem however is not the curriculum, it is the way the students study. When I attended a comp training school a couple years ago, I cannot tell you how many students used mcsebraindumps.com and other sites where they can get test questions. The percentage was huge. As a result, these people just memorized answers and did not know how to apply anything they learned (if they did at all) to real world situations. When they got out into the real world, they broke more than they fixed. As a result, companies now view these certifications with a skeptical eye. Sure, you passed the test - but what do you really know? Prove to me you can make it - but how do you get the shot if a sysadmin with ten years of experience wants that tech support job too? Answer: you don't. These schools have tried to hide this and have been largely successful, but the truth is finally coming out.
even the fancy certifications were not enough
You said it yourself. The certifications are usually anything but fancy. Most of these courses depend on your ability to memorize things and take a test. I have read a couple of the certification books and it doesn't even get close to teaching you any basics regarding the subject. I gave up pretty quickly.
The sad part is that the acronyms are deemed very important. My company actually sent out an email a little while ago urging everyone to put their 'acronyms' (MCSE, CISSP etc.) in their signatures because it creates a very good impression and I am talking about a reputed company.
I have a couple of friends who did take these certification courses, managed to get through and are doing good. WHY? The certification gave them a foot in the door and it was their persistence and hard work after that. Anybody with the idea of going through these certifications assuming that its going to get them a steady job for their life without any more effort is probably misled.
My 0.02$
Free XBox, PS2
Passion for the work doesn't come out of a crackerjack box. An MCSE or any "Certification" from a vendor, is just a manufacturers way of saying you have digested their propaganda. If you are looking to get rich quick while only working a few hours a week try No money down real estate.
It should come as no surprise that the people who went for these courses are now getting burned. The schools were unscrupulous but then again so were the majority of their students. Both parties were trying to sell sows ears as silk purses.
I am both self-taught and self-employed, and I have never once had a client ask me about my college degree (I don't have one, by choice), certifications, grades, diplomas, or anything else related.
When I managed a computer store and someone came in who was A+ certified, it was almost a strike against them. I found repeatedly that the technicians that were self-taught were far better at maintaining their skills in a rapidly changing environment.
I place zero value in any of these certifications.
It also has very good advice for becoming an accomplished programmer.
"Are you happy with your job? Think there's better? THERE IS (cue music). Become a certified network engineer or software developer at MADSKILLZ. Technology jobs are still paying well - our graduates make as much as $100,000 per year! Student loans available, call now and we'll throw in a comlimentary scale model Porsche - just like the one you'll be driving after you become a certified network engineer or software developer at MADSKILLZ!"
Why is anyone surprised that companies that advertise get rich quick schemes like this are going under? Dear trial lawyers - better sue quick because the IT certificate industry is going to die.
-- $G
It was interesting to watch as other post secondary institutes and even other departments at our institute jumped on the IT bandwagon. When I left the program in 2001, our institute was graduating close to 500 IT grads/year, not to mention the local University and College graduating an equal amount. Then there were the private schools were pumping out MSCEs and CNEs and now Cisco engineers.
The fact is that the market is saturated and the gravy train is over. Our school is hurting because we receive funding from the provincial government based on graduate's employment placement rate (for example: 93% employed after 6 months in their field of study). For the first time in 10 years, I've noticed that the placement rate description has changed from 6 months to 1 year and they've dropped the reference to "field of study" from the statistics. The IT programs are really hurting for enrollment also. People are wising up to the fact that it is difficult to get a job in IT with just a piece of paper.
The BSCS and Phd. CS guys that I've worked with always seemed like they were trained for research instead of getting the product shipped.
As it should be. The mistake was hiring scientists when engineers were wanted.
A doctorate is a research degree. By definition.
You don't hire an architect to hammer nails, and if he applies you have to realize he's going to need training as a carpenter.
KFG
The post talking about knowing frontpage and wanting an 80k a year salary, or the totally serious reply wanting to help.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but certs mean little nowadays. People on the NANOG list, SF lists, IPSlists they all argue this. Companies who hire strictly on certs should be ashamed of themselves. Now I'm not saying all cert holders are stupid, hell many know their stuff inside out, but studying for an exam is not equivalent to knowing your stuff.
How many people have come across someone on a mailing list asking for help for typical stuff all the while their attachment has their proudly pimped status written on it... CCNA, CCDP, CISSP. I've seen them all, and I've seen one too many times big corporations with clueless rejects administrating their networks:
I don't mean to pick on this one person, I know too many times I see the same stuff over and over, and wonder how the hell could companies hire clueless people. I remember I worked for a company who if you sent a resume in with your newly acquired MSCE cert staus you met Mr. Shredder. I also remember meeting three people who supposedly had CCNA's only to find out they were forgeries and the company I was working for never checked them. So again, from my perspective certs mean you have the capability to read and grasp something, but admining something at 4:00am is a different story altogether.MoFscker
Unless you are at a shit school, a CS Major should have a damn good idea how a computer works. What university did this person come from? Your second comment on the person with the Masters in CIS screams bullshit also unless this person came out of a diploma mill.
Here is another wonderful example: A kid finishes a university, does not really learn anything except to kiss ass, starts working for a major company, works there as tech support, decides it's not enough money, goes to another company and after a couple of months of 'programming' moves into more senior position by presenting other people ideas as his own. The kid never stops to do that because it seems to work really great for him, the salary grows, so do the lies and brown-nosing. The kid with only 2 months of programming and 2 years of 'architecture' moves into management positions by playing golf with the 'right' people. The others who work their asses of watch the kid zoom by them even though literally everyone knows how he is doing that, only management does not care, they like flattery and lies and backstubbing. Well, the kid is still there.
I would never want to work anywhere around such people but there seems to be an abundance of those.
You can't handle the truth.
These firms are run by people that have already made thier money, at significant taxpayer expense, and are now looking for another path to mooch of the corporate welfare system. The actual closing of the schools is insignificant, as the damage is already done.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Wow... all these posts and nobody mentions the many fine public community colleges!
Quality of courses and instructors varies widely--and with open admissions, I suppose many students may lack aptitude. But you have reasonable tuition rates, stability, and accountability. Not to mention accreditation.
I just started teaching Visual Basic programming (yeah, I know, I know...) at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. I feel a place like CCC is a pretty good alternative to for-profit private tech schools, although as a liberal-arts snob myself I am glad I attended a very competitive four-year private college.
As with anything else, there are good and bad community colleges. But I'm surprised nobody mentioned them as an option.
Being out of work, I am very tempted to start isolating these morons, and sending off some mail to their company explaining how they have a moron working for them (and I would be a better choice). Hmm.. I have some time on my hands right now...
Seconded. A couple years ago, I was standing in the local Borders back home, browsing the tech section, when a woman walked up to the networking section, and started looking at CCNA books. I heard her say, "I really wish they had these as audio books, I just don't have the time to read all this technical stuff..."
It really seems like the people who get these certifications, or at least as their primary means of education/self-improvement toward a job, are otherwise clueless, lazy, and really shouldn't be around a computer to begin with.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Are those that cross fields, venturing into new areas. Since you mentioned Linguistics and Comptuers, and those are two of the areas I'm studing I figured I'd chime in:
Right now there is quite a bit of research being done on computers and language. We want to make them speak it, listen to it, but above all, to understand it. This is a difficult problem, more difficult than most people think. I'll ignore the speaking and hearing part and just talk about the understanding:
To understand a language, a computer must not just have a bunch of symbols in memory that make up the words, it needs to be able to perform operations on those such as to derive what it meant. Well that invloved three fields right there, CS, linguistics and philsohpy. The CS of course is the actual implementation of the algorithms. But what algorithms to implement?
Well that's where linguistics come in. You need to analyze natural language and figure out how it actually works. Try and write rules that dictate what is and is not a correct utterence, how different parts of speech are usedm etc. Also you need to produce a database of words, meanings, parts of speech and so on. A lot of this has been done.
So what about the philosophy? Well the thing is, current popular linguistic theory doesn't work right for language as humans use it. It describes literal, direct speech only. Well humans aren't like that, most of our meanings are at least aprtially context dependant and not entirely direct and literal. So language philosophers are working on trying to develop empirically testable theories for how humans actually communicate, and how the process the different kinds of communication with ease. The field is called Pragmatics.
But this adds yet another part to the study. It's all well and good that we come up with a nice theory that everything fits in, but does that have anything to do with reality? Do humans ACTUALLY process language in such a way and does it really adiquately describe communications? So we turn to psychological tests to try and verify or falsify theories of language. Only through emperical testing of actual humans can we figure out how this works.
Those theories then need to be studied in the context of the actual spoken language and have rules developed, and those rules then need to be implemented as algorithms in a computer.
And that's just the beginning.
Thing is, this ISN'T an insignificant field. All the big computer companies like MS and IBM would LOVE to be able to produce a computer that people could speak to naturally and it would do what they wanted. Then there are people like the NSA that are highly interested in have a computer that can analyze the content of intercepted communication and do a real good translation and breakdown of it.
It's a field where there is quite a bit of money to be made, and a whole lot of work that needs to be done. However, what it really needs is people that aren't just one trick dogs, that have studied some in ALL of those fields (and others) to be able to work on designing and coordinating experiements and statical analysis of language to try and actually get a working system off the ground. Not just someone who knows code and nothing but code.
As a side note, I'm not studying this to go in it, just because I think it's a neat interdiciplinary degree to get. I'm a computer support guy by profession.
I propose a new Shashdot rule:
You can't bash any Cert. or Degree until you've earned it. Otherwise it's just sour grapes. Let those who've taken the time and effort to improve themselves decide its value.
I know that we're about to be overwhelmed with claims that:
1.) Certs are useless.
2.) Tech schools are useless
3.) BS degrees are useless
4.) Experience is GOD (and you can't get any)
and we'll hear stories like:
1.) I knew an MCSE who couldn't find the power switch on my server.
2.) My friend graduated from a Tech school and earned his CCIE and he can't even read.
3.) I never graduated from elementary school and I'm the most productive employee in my company's IT department.
Well isn't that special (and meaningless)
There are good and bad everything. Schools and certs are no different (except that they are harder to outsource).
I do contend that now IS the time to get into IT. If schools are closing, and no one wants to go into Tech then we're on our way to an eventual shortage. Shortage equals Opportunity.
He had passed the 4 (?) core exams for the win2k mcse. A jobs program had put him through a boot camp. When he got to me, I asked him to bring up the control panel.
Deer in headlights.
Ok. Hit the start button and go to control panel.
More bambi.
O.k....lower left corner. Left-click...
I am not making this up. It's possible the guy went into cranial vapor lock under pressure, but even in brainlock you should be able to find the control panel. Or at least the start button.
Nice guy, good attitude, might be some aptitude, but the thought that he was going to get hired as an admin somewhere after his internship was weird.
"So of course, someone who shouldn't have been in the class raised his hand and asked, "Is that an "i" after the "c"?"
You know what is really funny? The fact that you think someone should be knowledgeable about all facets of computers and semantics of specific operating systems in an "Intro to C++" course... if you were such a fucking hotshot why didn't you test out of the course? The point is people are in school to learn, not to be put down by elitists.
I had mod points, and was going to mod you down, but I'd rather vent. You need a serious attitude adjustment, and if you had actually turned around and chastised that poor fellow for wanting to learn, I seriously hope the professor would throw you out of the class by your ear like the immature punk you are.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.