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How ITT Tech Screwed Students and Made Millions (gizmodo.com)
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."
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.
That's exactly what I thought....
"So.... just like our entire higher education system?"
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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 contracting business can do very well for himself, obviously.
But college is about more than economics. It's the last time in your life that your job is to learn stuff; you don't realize what a luxury that is until you miss it. It's a time to make friendships and have experiences good and bad that you couldn't have had any other way.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.
... 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.