One for profit "college" down--how many more to go"

[moonshaz]

Good Riddance: 6 Facts About The ITT Tech Shut Down

This morning, one of the nation’s biggest for-profit colleges, ITT Tech, announced that it has permanently shut down its academic operations and fired the “overwhelming majority” of its more than 8,000 employees. In a typically self-pitying, remorseless statement, the company blamed all its woes

Comments

[beuk]

Thanks for posting. I was going to but I forgot during my walk home, ha.

This is welcome news!

[kate_mct]

Except that a lot of students got screwed over and left with student debt and no degree.

[ohmiya_sg]

They talked about that and loan forgiveness in the article, though.

[kate_mct]

Loan forgiveness, maybe, but Indiana is terrible about transferring credits from one school to another. So they'll probably still be SOL.

[moonshaz]

It's a shame for those people, but even having to start one's education over somewhere else is arguably better than graduating with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, only to find that your degree is absolutely worthless. That's what has happened to thousands of people.

The stock in trade for ITT and its ilk is to offer lots of programs in very specific career fields and sell them like crazy to uninformed (mostly lower income) marks students, with the promise that it will all be paid for by financial aid (mostly in the form of loans). What the salespeople "admissions counselors" don't bother to mention is that a diploma labeled "criminal justice" (to use one example) is not necessarily guaranteed to meet the professional standards of that field or have all of the necessary accreditations needed to actually get a job in that field. ITT Tech pulled that very stunt here in my state (IL) not long ago. People were told that they would be qualified for jobs in criminal justice after getting the degree in question, and that it was

[ohmiya_sg]

Sweet. I think this is the John Oliver video that talks about for-profit colleges that made me really fucking mad. I used to see ads for ITT Tech etc. all the time and I had no idea until I was well out of college myself that they were such scammers.

[amyura]

I know I'm just a dumb liberal, so what do I know, but isn't the DOE's desicion to decide where it spends its money the very definition of "free trade"? If ITT wants to compete in the free market, it can still do so. It just doesn't want to play unless it has taxpayer-funded advantage.

[pairatime]

No. in this case the Education Departments is the cartel/monopoly as roughly 2/3 of students get funds from it in some way or another so when they said no more it massively cut the pool of students that could go. So while I support what the Education Departments did you can't call any of this 'free trade.' The people didn't make the choice to stop going to ITT, the government (rightly) made it for them.

[pairatime]

Now if only the Education Departments would start cutting funds going to public schools that do similar things.

[moonshaz]

Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "similar" things and which institutions you've observed doing those things? I am personally not aware of any publicly funded educational institutions that operate the way ITT Tech and its ilk did/do (high pressure sales techniques, providing information to prospective students that's either incomplete or downright false, etc.). Please fill us in, by all means.

[pairatime]

My similar I mean two main things. 1. charging far more to go to the school then they openly claim with fees and other rates which they often don't list on their websites and don't tell you about until you see your bill. This for me personally was half as much as my tuitions. And while you can find the information if you really dig for it it's not easy. Even getting an explanation of the fees is a challenge. They are being deceptive in my mind

[rex_dart]

Which ones?