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Massachusetts AG Sues ITT Tech For Exploiting Computer Network Students (networkworld.com)
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.
Should've gone to DeVry.
It seems half the government needs to be held accountable for taking advantage of students
I imagine that the case will hinge on how much the AG is able to prove that ITT(or, just because this is how scam selling always goes, its marketing flacks verbally but not in writing) lied about the quality of their program, job prospects of graduates, and so on.
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.
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.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Somehow, unless you're just a raving lunatic (don't worry, we do in fact believe you are a genuine raving lunatic) and simply felt like ranting, I somehow believe you might have direct experience with ITT Tech and could have provided us with real life knowledge of how ITT works.
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 purchased items from home shopping network and infomercials... even when they were talking about how money was really tight this month.
Can you tell use, possibly with a few less expletives or possibly with the same quantity but more appropriately placed what your experience was?
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.
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 administer each other, but are not subject to the global admin. This would allow an intruder the power to set up a PERMANENT foothold in the network, and the global admin wouldnt even see them, let alone have admin power to remove them.
Then there are the strange loop problems with NDS contexts as introduced with alias objects. Basically, you can create endless context trees if you do it right. NDS should stop this as it can cause strange authentication behavior when you exhaust the context space.
The issue with creating print queues on system volumes. This should never be allowed, due to the issue of full system volumes downing the network. A malicious print job, and bam-- network down.
Thankfully nobody uses that shit anymore.
I remember having the "we really should be studying NT domain admin, not novell nds admin." with the instructors and getting nowhere. Look which one is still around. Hmmmmm.
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.
You're OK with a shoddy education so long as they don't make claims that are veritably false? I'm not calling you out, but I think it's worth taking a moment to let that sink in... IMHO we've let sketchy businesses get away with this kind of crap too long. Yeah, you and me know better. But there are _lots_ of desperate and vulnerable kids without the kind of critical thinking skills needed to realize ITT is a scam. Imagine if you went to a crappier school and maybe had an alcoholic parent or two. Or if you live in Flint and just got a healthy dose of lead in your drinking water... Suckers aren't just born, their made... :(
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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.
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.