Slashdot Mirror
ITT Tech Is Officially Closing (gizmodo.com)
Reader Joe_Dragon shares a Gizmodo report: ITT Technical Institute is officially closing all of its campuses following federal sanctions imposed against the company. The for-profit college announced the changes in a statement: "It is with profound regret that we must report that ITT Educational Services, Inc. will discontinue academic operations at all of its ITT Technical Institutes permanently after approximately 50 years of continuous service. With what we believe is a complete disregard by the U.S. Department of Education for due process to the company, hundreds of thousands of current students and alumni and more than 8,000 employees will be negatively affected."
ITT Tech announced it was closing all of its campuses just one week after it stopped enrolling students following a federal crackdown on for-profit colleges. ITT Tech and other higher education companies like it have been widely criticized for accepting billions of dollars in government grants and loans while failing to provide adequate job training for its students. Last year, ITT Tech received an estimated $580 million in federal money (aka taxpayer dollars), according to the Department of Education.
ITT Tech announced it was closing all of its campuses just one week after it stopped enrolling students following a federal crackdown on for-profit colleges. ITT Tech and other higher education companies like it have been widely criticized for accepting billions of dollars in government grants and loans while failing to provide adequate job training for its students. Last year, ITT Tech received an estimated $580 million in federal money (aka taxpayer dollars), according to the Department of Education.
I had a friend that worked at the office of one of these campuses. She told me that 99% of the time they didn't even have a teacher for the class until the day before it started, let alone lesson plans or anything else. She quit after the second FBI raid and never looked back.
But a degree in Liberal Arts won't get me me a high paying job???????
You laugh, but even down here in the republic of Texas kids are being fed a boatload of lies, usually in the name of classroom economy. If I had a dollar for every time I heard "the nation's largest tech companies are demanding these skills" (group work, collaboration, well-rounded, etc.) I could retire and start my own school. What I hear when they say this is "we need to reduce teacher workload to shave some dollars off the budget", because all the things they say they won't do in class I find myself doing for my kids at home because 4 kids who don't know the alphabet can't teach each other the alphabet. I have no doubt the CEOs are saying these things, but I question their motives and perspective.
Normally they talk to fortune 500 CEOs, of which by definition, there are 500 in the world and they make hiring decisions only for the most senior executives. Those that they even see represent the very cream of the crop in terms of demonstrated results and pedigree which eliminates the vast majority of the world's population. You would be better off following your dream to pursue professional sports rather than pursue such positions, there are more employed pro-athletes. They are NOT talking to hiring managers and rank and file employees who actually make the hiring decisions for the majority of employees which is far more useful information for the vast majority of students. Unfortunately what they find might be expensive.
The net result is we have kids who have been force-fed bad information and have then made bad choices in their education based on that bad information. Be a collaborator, be a team player, be a leader, just pursue your dream, get a degree in anything etc. All horrible advice. Archaeology maybe your dream and you may passionately love it, definitely pursue it, but have a very viable backup plan of something that will net you a job with high probability and that you can live with. Very likely that is the job you will be doing while you wait for the archaeology position to open, possibly indefinitely. Also don't mention to prospective recruiters that your first love is archaeology but plumbing is a second choice: the odds that they will resonate with your dream are low, but the odds you get marked as "overqualified" (code for: will probably leave us for another job before we're ready) are very high.
that cannot find enough trained machinists to keep up with production
That's because the entry level job is now open for Journeyman with 5+ years of experience, working $8/hr. Maybe if they did what they used to and hire dozens out of highschool for minimum wage, laid off the stoners and kept the ones who learned they'd have trained machinists again like companies did for centuries, but there's no instant gratification in that plan.
Instead they just hope someone else trains their employees for them, and whine like entitled brats when it turns out nobody's interested in doing that.
What we really need in this country are 4-year community colleges that are really focused on delivering value.
What we really need are good 2-year vocational schools + apprenticeships that teach young people actually useful skills, like plumbing, mechanic, welding, electrician, etc.
My company recently advertised a marketing position, and we got over 300 applications.
I recently tried to find a plumber for a kitchen remodel, and it took me over 3 weeks to find someone who wasn't fully booked for the next month, and he was only able to squeeze my job in by working on Sundays while my daughter watched his kids. I paid him $80/hr, and he paid my daughter $5/hr for babysitting, so he netted $75.
I think the problem with government money for college is that we went demand side rather than supply side. States have a good history of building public universities that provided a great education at a great price and admitting students who could actually benefit from that education. Eventually, we shifted tons of money into providing loans and grants, which ultimately just arms both sides in a bidding war over the same set of seats for already existing universities. In general, when that happens, the price goes up and more suppliers enter the market to satisfy the demand. The problem here is that it's a lot easier to build a shitty fake university to soak up easy tuition dollars than it is to build a real university that actually educates people and has standards.
Worse, as more and more people are selected for seats in real schools, the remaining people with piles of federal cash burning holes in their pockets are, on average, worse and worse students. So building a good quality school with high standards isn't even necessarily the right thing to do even if your heart is in the right place and you're willing invest the money doing so. Ultimately, you just end up with a bunch of fly by night operations that specialize in separating vulnerable students from their loan money.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I guess it's gotten a lot worse from 20+ years ago. My ITT two year degree from 23 years ago is accredited, and employers at the time were very happy with graduates from the particular ITT I attended. At the time, they had a 100% placement rate for everyone who graduated and did not go on to further education (and that was my whole reason for going, as my 4 year engineering degree from a top 10 school got me and 70% of the graduating class na-da : and the rest broke down as 20% going on to grad school and 10% being the chem engineers getting hired to go work in Saudi Arabia). But that quality came from the local ITT staff, not the corporate level. I heard even back then that the quality of your education depended on which location you went to. And it was definitely a heck of a lot easier than my 4 year degree, but also one heck of a lot more practical (which makes sense given it was a degree for a technician working on circuit boards, etc, not an engineer designing parts or systems).