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California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

293 points by emeraldd 10y ago

serg_chernata 10y ago
Does anyone know which other national institutions something like this may affect?
- AtomicFirepig 10y ago
  DeVry is in the same boat, I would assume. Similar model, for-profit, crappy education, etc.
- finid 10y ago
  Virtually all of them. Their main interest is the Federal student loan program. Vets are a special target. > The emergency order, which takes effect Sept. 1, comes one day after the U.S. Department of Education banned ITT from enrolling new students who use federal financial aid.
- ryuker16 10y ago
  many are public so this might stocks dropping across the board due to investor panic. Im sure ITT stock holders are shitting bricks.
gdwatson 10y ago
Does anyone have references to more specific accusations against ITT? There are lots of vague claims in the article, but the only semi-specific ones -- misleading students about program quality and pushing them into irresponsible loans -- could just as easily be laid at the feet of public and private nonprofit colleges. I have no particular reason to trust or distrust ITT. But it strikes me as a trade school that presents itself as a college, and that seems like one viable approach to our credentialism issues, so I want to know if it's being attacked for legitimate or political reasons.
- finid 10y ago
  > so I want to know if it's being attacked for legitimate or political reasons. Why would California attack ITT for political reasons? The problem with ITT is the same problem with all such schools - profit above all else. Whether their students learn anything is secondary.
  - duncan_bayne 10y ago
    Proponents of taxpayer funded education, and unions, frequently attack high performing private schools, at least here in Australasia. That said, it doesn't sound like this is one of the high performing schools.
    - colechristensen 10y ago
      There is a very big difference between a private university and a for-profit school.
      - duncan_bayne 10y ago
        Educate me ;) Seriously, I'd be interested to know what you see the difference is.
        dagw 10y ago
        The two big differences are that (most) private universities are accredited by some recognized body, meaning your degree from a private university will be recognized as valid by other universities if you want to transfer or continue your education somewhere else. Most for-profit schools are not accredited and thus their degree isn't recognized by other universities. The second difference is one of structure. For-profit universities are, well, for-profit companies, meaning their top priority is to hit earning targets and satisfy shareholders, many of whom may very well put their own short term financial interests ahead of the long term well being of the school or its students. Private universities tend to be set up as non-profit trusts, answerable to a board of trustees who's priorities should be more aligned with the long term reputation and well being of the school. Of course this is all on some sort of sliding scale and there may very well be well-run accredited for profit schools with share-holders with a long term vision for the school and there are no doubt terribly run private universities with trustees whom try to use their position to wring out personal profits. But that is the basic gist of it.
jorts 10y ago
At my last company we had a slew of ITT graduates apply for a role one time. I talked to probably 10 or so of them. They seemed to have received little to no educational value from their time at ITT. I assume they were all promised great jobs, but all of them were not remotely qualified to get even a basic entry level technical role. I felt terrible for them paying money for the "education" that they received.
- increment_i 10y ago
  I'd be interested to hear what you would expect as bare minimums for a "basic entry level technical role." I've heard of recruiters being dumbfounded at CS grads not being able to code FizzBuzz and to be honest I can't believe it.
  - dmd 10y ago
    I've personally interviewed applicants for a "senior developer" position who claimed on their resume 5+ years of jobs where their primary job was supposedly programming, and who could not come up with code to sum the odd integers from 1 to n.
    - bko 10y ago
      I've heard stories like that before. Serious question, what do those people actually do? Are they just so far removed from these general type of questions that they can not answer them or do they have no programming ability at all? It just strikes me as bizarre
      - meowface 10y ago
        For some, it could be anxiety. I sometimes choke on really simple questions in interviews that I know I could easily answer if I were home alone. I have anxiety issues in general, though.
        rtpg 10y ago
trengrj 10y ago
This site is absolutely unusable without an ad blocker..
- finid 10y ago
  Well, I read the article and don't have an ad blocker. People tend to take this complaint about ads way too far.
electic 10y ago
What about coding bootcamps? Aren't they worse? They try to make you a "coder" in a couple of months and promise people jobs if they finish the course. It sounds eerily the same thing as ITT...
- madlynormal 10y ago
  One of the recent members of my team was from a bootcamp, she's been a real joy to work with and has mad some decent contributions. Bootcamps may serve their purpose but like with anything else YMMV.
- jmharvey 10y ago
  I'd imagine it depends on the "bootcamp." It seems like many of the more reputable ones don't charge tuition and make their money on referral agreements for successful placements.
  - rahimnathwani 10y ago
    "It seems like many of the more reputable ones don't charge tuition" The only one I know which doesn't charge is 42. Are there others? Which ones?
    - ajdlinux 10y ago
      App Academy charges its tuition as a proportion of first year salary.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - bhaumik 10y ago
        + a $5000 upfront deposit. We* do the opposite and offer a 100% refund if the student isn't employed as a developer within 6 months of graduation. As for the original comment, some coding bootcamps are starting to publish stats on graduate rate/outcomes (a few of which are also 3rd-party audited). The industry as a whole still has some bad eggs, but it's getting better. https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/25/students-are-demanding-the-facts-about-coding-bootcamps/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/25/students-are-demanding-the... *https://www.thinkful.com https://www.thinkful.com
rdtsc 10y ago
Are there any good ITT / University of Phoenix type schools? They all seem like scams. I don't count community colleges here, I know those can be very good. My wife went to one, got great education, was able to pay it by just budgeting money every month out of her part time work. Then switched to a 4 years univeristy, transfered credits and graduated with honors after 2 more years (with minimal loans). Would it be hard for any of these for-profit school to also do a good job?
- zitterbewegung 10y ago
  Digipen has some alumni in Valve that worked on mechanics for portal and portal 2 http://digipen.edu http://digipen.edu
  - Jach 10y ago
    As a graduate of a few years ago and repeating what some folks from before even my time have mentioned I'll be the first to add that digipen isn't what it once was. Sure it's not really close to ITT levels of fail... Yet.
    - Hydraulix989 10y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRWvfMLl4ho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRWvfMLl4ho Schools like that are where the "Tighten up the graphics on Level 3" meme came from!
- pmichaud 10y ago
  This is a classic problem. You have a situation where the quality of the thing (in this case teaching) isn't easily known ahead of time, so the success of the organization isn't dependent on the quality of teaching, but instead is dependent on the quality of marketing (roughly). So now you have a bunch of organizations with limited resources competing in the same space, and we'd like it if the organizations who provided the best education were winning. And providing a good education isn't opposed to also having good marketing, in principle. The problem is that the organizations that try to be good at both teaching and marketing are competing against organizations that are trying to ONLY be good at marketing. The marketing organization will tend to win over time because it's easier to be good at one instead of being good at both, and the organizations that are just good at teaching die because they are bad at marketing. tldr; Teaching is hard. Marketing is hard. Both at the same time is hard squared.
imh 10y ago
I think this is a fantastic step in the right direction, but what is the legal justification here? ITT is in no way alone in being evil and predatory, so I'm surprised I keep hearing about crackdowns for them but not for anyone else. I'd love to see some new rules to keep all of these predatory places from operating instead of what kinda seems like a picking out a scapegoat. (Or is all this recent news more general and everyone just mentions ITT?)
- Kadin 10y ago
  California would probably like to ban all of the for-profits, but can't. ITT, however, stepped so far beyond the pale that it gave regulators an opportunity to punish them. California is basing its move on a US Department of Education decision, which itself was based on a history of previous litigation, which started because of concerns over ITT's accreditation. Basically: no accreditation, no loans, which given ITT's business model would basically put them out of business. And if a school's accreditation is threatened in some way, the Fed can step in and require the school to post a bond, so that the USG isn't left footing the bill (students are already protected by law). This, from what I can tell, is what happened to ITT: their accreditation was looking sketchy, so the Feds started to get concerned, and required them to post progressively larger bonds to protect the government against a closure, and also cut off new Federally-funded students from starting. This may or may not be enough to kill them as a company. CA is using this concern over future viability, combined with what appear to be some pretty strong consumer-protection laws, to prevent them from registering new students at all in CA. (I'm somewhat surprised they can do this, if you were just going to pay cash-on-the-barrel-head and not get anyone else's money involved, but they must have some particularly stringent laws about higher ed in CA. Probably not a bad idea all in all.) It's been speculated that what the US DOE is doing is a rare example of the administrative "corporate death penalty" in action; that the moves are designed not just for the immediate regulatory ends, but actually to kill ITT. Pour encourager les autres, as the saying goes. Of course they can't come right out and say that, but it would fit with some of the evidence. And personally, I'm ready to throw some rotten vegetables as they're climbing the scaffold to the noose.
  - r00fus 10y ago
beedogs 10y ago
Great. Now how will I learn TV/VCR repair?
roymurdock 10y ago
For those interested you can find reactions from students, teachers, trolls, and the peanut gallery here: https://www.thelayoff.com/itt-educational-services https://www.thelayoff.com/itt-educational-services On the front page of the website you'll notice that Education Management Corp, University of Phoenix, Corinthian, Zenith Education, etc. are receiving an increased amount of attention.
cloudjacker 10y ago
wow thats horrible news for all those motivated people that "were the first in their family to go to college"
crazy1van 10y ago
I agree with a lot of the complaints I've heard about ITT. They seem to broadly fall into three camps: 1) They are expensive and rely on their students getting gov't loans, 2) They don't adequately prepare students for the work place, and 3) The teachers aren't very good. I think those are all great reasons to not go to ITT. But, I think those reasons could also apply to a whole lot of other schools, profit, non-profit, private, and public. Certainly, I think #1 applies to a whole lot of schools and student #2 applies to any school that has majors with poor job prospects. And I think nearly every college student has experienced #3 with at least some of their professors -- sometimes because they dont know the material well and other times because they are completely uninterested in the teaching aspect of their job.
- colordrops 10y ago
  You're analyses of #2 and #3 are too crude. In the case of #2, there is a difference between teaching subjects that are not in demand and teaching subjects poorly. ITT is in the latter. For #3, at a good university, you may have some bad teachers, but the majority are usually good, and the overall experience is beneficial. This is also probably not the case with ITT.
  - jessedhillon 10y ago
    How can we legitimately know whether an ITT grad is sufficiently equivalent to one from a traditional university? The complaints from the state focus default rates, but if there's a hiring bias against hiring for-profit graduates, then default rates are measuring the strength of that bias.
    - gohrt 10y ago
      What bias? You can't get a degree in HVAC repair at a traditional university. It's a different labor pool.
      - jessedhillon 10y ago
        Here's ITT's course catalog for their Oakland campus: https://www.itt-tech.edu/campus/download/140.pdf https://www.itt-tech.edu/campus/download/140.pdf I'll save you the surprise of discovering that Ctrl+F'ing for "HVAC" yields zero results.
h4nkoslo 10y ago
One aspect of ITT and its ilk is that the students often only sign up so they can take out "education" loans for living expenses, with the class work as a very secondary concern.
- Blackthorn 10y ago
  You're gonna need to provide a citation for such a serious claim.
  - h4nkoslo 10y ago
    It's hardly a secret that student loans, intentionally, cover living expenses, and that enrolment rises when the economy sucks. Students aren't embezzling the money; living expenses are bundled with the (crappy) package. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304585004579415022664472930 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023045850045794150...
- trentmb 10y ago
  That's not unique to ITT.
  - h4nkoslo 10y ago
    Hence "ilk".
grej 10y ago
ITT seems like an easy first place to go because of their shady rep, but I think the risk here is that well entrenched interests in will ultimately give bootcamps and other online training courses the same treatment if they start eating into the educational establishment's pie too much. We have to be careful of a slippery slope.
- ryuker16 10y ago
  Too late, some of the bigger chains have been bought out.
twblalock 10y ago
I hope DeVry is next.
- bbarn 10y ago
  I don't know if they're as deserving of the vitriol. I've interviewed and worked with several people with DeVry degrees. I can't say if it's sample size or just good luck or both but I haven't been disappointed with them.
- geomark 10y ago
  I went to DeVry. It was good. I was motivated, got through it with good grades, and had three job offers waiting for me when I graduated. Everyone in my class who graduated had at least one offer. Employers knew the reputation of the school which is why there were so many present on interview day and every graduate was offered a job. That was quite a few years ago so maybe things have changed, I don't know.
wallace_f 10y ago
This is just the tip of the iceberg with problems in education, though. Let's not act like higher education in the US is exemplary.
beenfired 10y ago
According to the ITT Tech Website they have now stopped accepting new enrollments nationwide.
electriclove 10y ago
Bravo, now let's ban the rest of the fake schools!
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Btw to avoid confusion I've seen happen when a new guy shows up in the workplace: ITT != IIT ITT = ~University of Phoenix, everyone gets in IIT = Elite programs in a variety of sciences, almost no one gets in
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  To clarify, IIT is the Indian Institute of Technology, a series of schools that are basically India's MIT as I've had it described to me by people that went there. I had some graduate friends from there while I was in undergrad and they were very bright.
ghshephard 10y ago
"Last year, it enrolled 45,000 students and reported $850 million in revenue". That's about $19k/year/student. Just to put that in perspective, a 10 day Cisco Network Engineering course from Unitek in the Bay area (last time I took one, great school, at least in network engineering) costs $8,200. The issue isn't the cost, honestly, $19k/year isn't that expensive, the issue is whether they are delivering value for money.
- whyenot 10y ago
  Something doesn't match up with those numbers. Tuition at ITT starts at about $45k/yr. http://programinfo.itt-tech.edu/cost.pdf http://programinfo.itt-tech.edu/cost.pdf
- ryuker16 10y ago
  Those courses are paid by your company as training or to accqure some cert to obtain a contract.....its not priced accurately nor intended for guys on the street.
  - ghshephard 10y ago
    Not sure what you mean when you say, "Not priced accurately" - I looked around, and pretty much all the schools charge around the same price, if you want to be sitting in a lab with other students for 10 hours a day for 10 days with a best-of-class instructor. Lots of room for competition if someone thinks they can do it more cheaply, but the instructors are very expensive (they are the best in the business - and if you aren't happy with them, you walk out and demand a full refund at that kind of price). We definitely had students in the room who had paid out of their own pocket for the course. I've taken these courses both through work, and independently, paying myself. I would much rather give someone $8500 and 10 days later come out with some highly relevant, actionable knowledge then spend a year (or two!) of my time getting some "credential" - there is a pretty big opportunity cost to my time.
    - ghshephard 10y ago
      Also - put another way, not even including the cost of facilities, and equipment - I'm paying $8500 for 100 hours of instructor time. $85/hr (admittedly shared with a small group of other students) of a world class education, where every single second is optimized. Seems reasonable to me.
joshmn 10y ago
Are they preying on desperate students, or people who are considered "unfavorable" to learning otherwise? I know a few people who considered ITT. They all have one thing alike: they're not the smartest or most driven of people by any means. (that's two, sorry) I'm curious... What are their student's standardized test scores, as well as high school records? I'm sure there's a pattern there that can describe some their default rates.
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Companies like ITT specifically target military service members because they are: 1) In their twenties and looking to start a career outside the military. 2) Eligible for a variety of loans, grants, and other financial services unavailable to the general public. 3) If they are still in the military, they will have much lower default rates as the military takes debt very seriously (as a representation of character really). (IMO) none of these qualities are unfavorable to traditional institutions. Companies like ITT are 100% vultures. source: many friends in the military
  - jcurbo 10y ago
    All true. The Post-9/11 GI Bill was a large driver of this - if you've done your time, it's basically free schooling and all you have to do is sign up. The govt sends the tuition money directly to the school, you just have to recertify with the VA every semester. (In the old GI Bill you got the money first, and the rates were different) (source: prior military, used Post-9/11 GI Bill to get my master's)
  - ryuker16 10y ago
    Another huge factor is that laws aimed at these schools required a threshold of students didnt use federal student loans to attend. Army loans qualified are sufficiently different and allowed them meet that quota without having to go the filthy route giving hefty scholarships to attract non-suckers at reasonable rates.
pkaye 10y ago
This caption pretty much captures what is wrong with ITT tech. "Jorge Villalba, shown in 2015 in front of the ITT Technical Institute in Encinco, left the school owing about $150,000 in student loans." How the heck does someone end up owing $150K for a basic education?
known 10y ago
I believe many ITT students are from India.
- praneshp 10y ago
  I doubt it. Even if we wanted to waste our money there, the chances of getting a F1 visa is slim to none. Maybe there are Indians attending these schools illegally but pretty sure it's not large enough for anyone to notice. Do you have a source?
  - ryuker16 10y ago
    There is a con where guys looking for a usa visa get accepted at a school with no classes. i wouldnt be surprised if some for-profits did this on the side for extra cash. Also, some foreigners just dont know any better and get conned.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
headmelted 10y ago
Reading the comments here has been really eye opening to me. I always knew that tuition was orders-of-magnitude more expensive across the Atlantic but now it's a bit clearer why. Here (Northern Ireland, but it applies to the UK as a whole), students don't start to repay their loans until their earnings are over a certain threshold, then repayments are proportional to how much they earn over that level. If their annual earnings ever fall below it again, payments stop until they're back on their feet. I can't remember exactly what my interest rate was but I know it was fixed BELOW the central bank rate at the time. Standard financial advice here is to max the loan out even if you weren't in need of it and just put it in a savings account for the interest (probably not worth it these days). Lastly, if the loans aren't fully repaid by retirement age, they're written off. So yeah, you folks are really getting screwed over there.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  New Zealand use to have free education. Then it became interest free ... unless you left the country. They bleed a lot of talent out to Australia, so if you move for more than 6 months they start charging you interest. It turned from being a good socialist system that helped everyone to being a forced means of talent retention. In the same way, American student loans are really aimed at keeping people trapped in industry they might grow to hate. Everyone has to pay the mortgage and all that.
  - elemenopy 10y ago
    I think "forced means of talent retention" is an unfairly harsh characterisation. It's a pretty reasonable policy considering taxpayers have to service the debt, and people who go overseas stop paying tax. It's all very well to propose a "good socialist system" but if people pay domestic fees and then leave NZ they're essentially getting a free ride and it's the people who don't go to uni who end up paying for it.
  - crummy 10y ago
    It's not forced though, is it? You just have to pay interest.
  - deleted 10y ago
yuhong 10y ago
Just "ordered to engrossing and enrolling": http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160SB1192 http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xht...
- zerocrates 10y ago
  An "enrolled" bill is one that has been passed.
nsxwolf 10y ago
Why can't there be such thing as a good for-profit school? We buy the highest quality smartphones from Apple and Samsung after all - I don't see a lot of non-profit phones or government phones.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Phones tend to be a repeated purchase that people are quickly able to assess costs and benefits of and optimize. It thus more closely approximates the rational choice model under which free markets are efficient.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  I think the main trouble is that the target market is largely young, uneducated, hopeful, and flush with guaranteed loans. Basically, a scammer's dream come true.
- ryuker16 10y ago
  Typically the get bought out by shady operators and converted to the same con game...extra bonus if they acquire some accreditation. Now that bootcamps have proven successful, many of these companies have bought them out too!
SFJulie 10y ago
Education is a small tulip: try to compensate unfairness of life by subsidizing a flower to wed, an housing, health or education ... and here comes the bubbles fueled by the greed of a few who have had the luck of being born lucky. In the case of tulip, it has still not be proven that wedding a girl that had an obsession for a foreign expensive flower was a good idea. And for coding neither the diploma, nor the idea of ruining yourself before either beginning to work has proven to be useful. Overvalued diploma are a scam. Education is partly made of a financial bubble that takes its non-productive toll on economy. I hope Europa will begin to fire its teachers in public shcools and stop the privatization of education alike. I hate to fuel bubble with my taxes like a Dutch in the XVIIIth century.
yamike 10y ago
I went to ITT Tech and had mixed experiences in different classes. All in all it would have been cheaper and much better for me to have attended the state university and gotten a BS rather than the two years at ITT for an associates degree. In terms of the classes, I had some taught by really great instructors, local professionals who were great about teaching skills that companies would actually care about. I also had some totally worthless instructors. In one instance I ended up standing up in front of the class and teaching everyone - instructor included - what polymorphism is.
ne01 10y ago
I don't like our current educational system and really hate for-profit schools like ITT, so I'm kind of happy to see them fail. Unless you really add value to the learning process, it is ugly to charge someone to teach them something they can easily learn on their own and most of the time ruin their curiosity! In the future more people will learn on their own and just take a free test to get a certificate! Oh and books will be free (or very cheap) with government subsidies.
WhatIsThisIm12 10y ago
As someone who graduated from an Ivy Leage school, and boarding school before that, all on full financial aid with zero loans, I count myself incredibly lucky. I also see the student loan system as incredibly fucked up. The worst aspect of it to me is that the most predatory loans go to the lowest qualified students, who are the ones who get the lower paying jobs. Top universities are the only ones with loan-free, need-blind financial aid programs. Yet they're the ones with students who would be most qualified to pay any loans back. Meanwhile lower tier universities charge tuitions almost as large as the top tier ones, yet send students to $40k/yr jobs. The students who need the money most don't get it.
- ryuker16 10y ago
  Actually these students qualify for a large amount of federal student loans due to poverty. Private student loan vendors are would never lend to these for-profit students with out collateral or a well off co-signer.
tomohawk 10y ago
Maybe they should have done what Laureate did. http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/23/news/clinton-laureate-university/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/23/news/clinton-laureate-univer...
bane 10y ago
One of the things that's very interesting to me is how information asymmetry helps drive people to these kinds of companies. I don't know everybody's story, but when I was just out of high school, there was no chance (I believed at the time) that I'd be able to go to a traditional school. I had bad grades, my family was poor and nobody in my family had gone to university except for my father, who had quickly abandoned his post-University career for more blue collar work. Wanting to try to make over minimum wage, I went to an ITT-like trade school to talk with an "admissions counselor" seeing if they would accept me (of course they would, for a price). I took a fairly simple "placement exam" (which of course I passed). I told the counselor I didn't have any money (no problem!) I was then shown a variety of ultra high-interest loan options which would guarantee I could get through the "program" (just sign here!). I remember getting odd, cagey, answers about the accreditation of the trade school, and couldn't imagine how I'd pay back a loan that large if I took it on. I had the presence of mind to "let me think about it" instead of giving in to the hard pressure sale the guidance counselor was offering, went on to work my crappy jobs for a couple more years before accidentally running into an old friend who grew up in a similar situation as me and ended up going the community college route. It was "real" college (for some value of "real" and "college"), was a tiny fraction of the cost of the trade school, and graduation guaranteed placement in a state school of my choice. That sounded too good to be true, at least the trade school had some kind of real cost associated with it. But I went and checked it out, it was all true. A.S.->B.S.->M.S. and now I have a career, no student debt and choice of great high-paying jobs. Later, while I was attending community college, a coworker was going to that same trade school, hemorrhaging money and then one monday came in and told a story where they had gone out of business, didn't tell anybody, and just padlocked the doors over the weekend. Of course he still owed all the money for his loans.
- pault 10y ago
  Was it the Art Institutes International? My mother taught typography and design there and I could tell you some stories! It, and schools like it, are very intentionally set up as funnels for government school loan programs. There were some good teachers there that did their best, but the corporate side was a pit of snakes. The labs were all outfitted with 5 year old technology, the teachers were paid peanuts, but every year the recruiter with the most sales got an all expenses paid two week vacation at a five star tropical resort. If you want to see the effects of the education bubble, take a look at for-profit trade schools.
rayiner 10y ago
Not a bad thing, but I feel like many public institutions at the bottom end of the scale aren't much better, just a little cheaper. There is a whole rung of public 4-year universities where the modal outcome is working a job that doesn't require the degree you paid a lot of money for.

293 points by emeraldd 10y ago

serg_chernata 10y ago

Does anyone know which other national institutions something like this may affect?

AtomicFirepig 10y ago
DeVry is in the same boat, I would assume. Similar model, for-profit, crappy education, etc.
finid 10y ago
Virtually all of them. Their main interest is the Federal student loan program. Vets are a special target. > The emergency order, which takes effect Sept. 1, comes one day after the U.S. Department of Education banned ITT from enrolling new students who use federal financial aid.
ryuker16 10y ago
many are public so this might stocks dropping across the board due to investor panic. Im sure ITT stock holders are shitting bricks.

gdwatson 10y ago

Does anyone have references to more specific accusations against ITT? There are lots of vague claims in the article, but the only semi-specific ones -- misleading students about program quality and pushing them into irresponsible loans -- could just as easily be laid at the feet of public and private nonprofit colleges. I have no particular reason to trust or distrust ITT. But it strikes me as a trade school that presents itself as a college, and that seems like one viable approach to our credentialism issues, so I want to know if it's being attacked for legitimate or political reasons.

finid 10y ago
> so I want to know if it's being attacked for legitimate or political reasons. Why would California attack ITT for political reasons? The problem with ITT is the same problem with all such schools - profit above all else. Whether their students learn anything is secondary.
- duncan_bayne 10y ago
  Proponents of taxpayer funded education, and unions, frequently attack high performing private schools, at least here in Australasia. That said, it doesn't sound like this is one of the high performing schools.
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    There is a very big difference between a private university and a for-profit school.
    - duncan_bayne 10y ago
      Educate me ;) Seriously, I'd be interested to know what you see the difference is.
      - dagw 10y ago
        The two big differences are that (most) private universities are accredited by some recognized body, meaning your degree from a private university will be recognized as valid by other universities if you want to transfer or continue your education somewhere else. Most for-profit schools are not accredited and thus their degree isn't recognized by other universities. The second difference is one of structure. For-profit universities are, well, for-profit companies, meaning their top priority is to hit earning targets and satisfy shareholders, many of whom may very well put their own short term financial interests ahead of the long term well being of the school or its students. Private universities tend to be set up as non-profit trusts, answerable to a board of trustees who's priorities should be more aligned with the long term reputation and well being of the school. Of course this is all on some sort of sliding scale and there may very well be well-run accredited for profit schools with share-holders with a long term vision for the school and there are no doubt terribly run private universities with trustees whom try to use their position to wring out personal profits. But that is the basic gist of it.

jorts 10y ago

At my last company we had a slew of ITT graduates apply for a role one time. I talked to probably 10 or so of them. They seemed to have received little to no educational value from their time at ITT. I assume they were all promised great jobs, but all of them were not remotely qualified to get even a basic entry level technical role. I felt terrible for them paying money for the "education" that they received.

increment_i 10y ago
I'd be interested to hear what you would expect as bare minimums for a "basic entry level technical role." I've heard of recruiters being dumbfounded at CS grads not being able to code FizzBuzz and to be honest I can't believe it.
- dmd 10y ago
  I've personally interviewed applicants for a "senior developer" position who claimed on their resume 5+ years of jobs where their primary job was supposedly programming, and who could not come up with code to sum the odd integers from 1 to n.
  - bko 10y ago
    I've heard stories like that before. Serious question, what do those people actually do? Are they just so far removed from these general type of questions that they can not answer them or do they have no programming ability at all? It just strikes me as bizarre
    - meowface 10y ago
      For some, it could be anxiety. I sometimes choke on really simple questions in interviews that I know I could easily answer if I were home alone. I have anxiety issues in general, though.
      - rtpg 10y ago

trengrj 10y ago

This site is absolutely unusable without an ad blocker..

finid 10y ago
Well, I read the article and don't have an ad blocker. People tend to take this complaint about ads way too far.

electic 10y ago

What about coding bootcamps? Aren't they worse? They try to make you a "coder" in a couple of months and promise people jobs if they finish the course. It sounds eerily the same thing as ITT...

madlynormal 10y ago
One of the recent members of my team was from a bootcamp, she's been a real joy to work with and has mad some decent contributions. Bootcamps may serve their purpose but like with anything else YMMV.
jmharvey 10y ago
I'd imagine it depends on the "bootcamp." It seems like many of the more reputable ones don't charge tuition and make their money on referral agreements for successful placements.
- rahimnathwani 10y ago
  "It seems like many of the more reputable ones don't charge tuition" The only one I know which doesn't charge is 42. Are there others? Which ones?
  - ajdlinux 10y ago
    App Academy charges its tuition as a proportion of first year salary.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - bhaumik 10y ago
      + a $5000 upfront deposit. We* do the opposite and offer a 100% refund if the student isn't employed as a developer within 6 months of graduation. As for the original comment, some coding bootcamps are starting to publish stats on graduate rate/outcomes (a few of which are also 3rd-party audited). The industry as a whole still has some bad eggs, but it's getting better. https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/25/students-are-demanding-the-facts-about-coding-bootcamps/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/25/students-are-demanding-the... *https://www.thinkful.com https://www.thinkful.com

rdtsc 10y ago

Are there any good ITT / University of Phoenix type schools? They all seem like scams. I don't count community colleges here, I know those can be very good. My wife went to one, got great education, was able to pay it by just budgeting money every month out of her part time work. Then switched to a 4 years univeristy, transfered credits and graduated with honors after 2 more years (with minimal loans). Would it be hard for any of these for-profit school to also do a good job?

zitterbewegung 10y ago
Digipen has some alumni in Valve that worked on mechanics for portal and portal 2 http://digipen.edu http://digipen.edu
- Jach 10y ago
  As a graduate of a few years ago and repeating what some folks from before even my time have mentioned I'll be the first to add that digipen isn't what it once was. Sure it's not really close to ITT levels of fail... Yet.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRWvfMLl4ho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRWvfMLl4ho Schools like that are where the "Tighten up the graphics on Level 3" meme came from!
pmichaud 10y ago
This is a classic problem. You have a situation where the quality of the thing (in this case teaching) isn't easily known ahead of time, so the success of the organization isn't dependent on the quality of teaching, but instead is dependent on the quality of marketing (roughly). So now you have a bunch of organizations with limited resources competing in the same space, and we'd like it if the organizations who provided the best education were winning. And providing a good education isn't opposed to also having good marketing, in principle. The problem is that the organizations that try to be good at both teaching and marketing are competing against organizations that are trying to ONLY be good at marketing. The marketing organization will tend to win over time because it's easier to be good at one instead of being good at both, and the organizations that are just good at teaching die because they are bad at marketing. tldr; Teaching is hard. Marketing is hard. Both at the same time is hard squared.

imh 10y ago

I think this is a fantastic step in the right direction, but what is the legal justification here? ITT is in no way alone in being evil and predatory, so I'm surprised I keep hearing about crackdowns for them but not for anyone else. I'd love to see some new rules to keep all of these predatory places from operating instead of what kinda seems like a picking out a scapegoat. (Or is all this recent news more general and everyone just mentions ITT?)

Kadin 10y ago
California would probably like to ban all of the for-profits, but can't. ITT, however, stepped so far beyond the pale that it gave regulators an opportunity to punish them. California is basing its move on a US Department of Education decision, which itself was based on a history of previous litigation, which started because of concerns over ITT's accreditation. Basically: no accreditation, no loans, which given ITT's business model would basically put them out of business. And if a school's accreditation is threatened in some way, the Fed can step in and require the school to post a bond, so that the USG isn't left footing the bill (students are already protected by law). This, from what I can tell, is what happened to ITT: their accreditation was looking sketchy, so the Feds started to get concerned, and required them to post progressively larger bonds to protect the government against a closure, and also cut off new Federally-funded students from starting. This may or may not be enough to kill them as a company. CA is using this concern over future viability, combined with what appear to be some pretty strong consumer-protection laws, to prevent them from registering new students at all in CA. (I'm somewhat surprised they can do this, if you were just going to pay cash-on-the-barrel-head and not get anyone else's money involved, but they must have some particularly stringent laws about higher ed in CA. Probably not a bad idea all in all.) It's been speculated that what the US DOE is doing is a rare example of the administrative "corporate death penalty" in action; that the moves are designed not just for the immediate regulatory ends, but actually to kill ITT. Pour encourager les autres, as the saying goes. Of course they can't come right out and say that, but it would fit with some of the evidence. And personally, I'm ready to throw some rotten vegetables as they're climbing the scaffold to the noose.
- r00fus 10y ago

beedogs 10y ago

Great. Now how will I learn TV/VCR repair?

roymurdock 10y ago

For those interested you can find reactions from students, teachers, trolls, and the peanut gallery here: https://www.thelayoff.com/itt-educational-services https://www.thelayoff.com/itt-educational-services On the front page of the website you'll notice that Education Management Corp, University of Phoenix, Corinthian, Zenith Education, etc. are receiving an increased amount of attention.

cloudjacker 10y ago

wow thats horrible news for all those motivated people that "were the first in their family to go to college"

crazy1van 10y ago

I agree with a lot of the complaints I've heard about ITT. They seem to broadly fall into three camps: 1) They are expensive and rely on their students getting gov't loans, 2) They don't adequately prepare students for the work place, and 3) The teachers aren't very good. I think those are all great reasons to not go to ITT. But, I think those reasons could also apply to a whole lot of other schools, profit, non-profit, private, and public. Certainly, I think #1 applies to a whole lot of schools and student #2 applies to any school that has majors with poor job prospects. And I think nearly every college student has experienced #3 with at least some of their professors -- sometimes because they dont know the material well and other times because they are completely uninterested in the teaching aspect of their job.

colordrops 10y ago
You're analyses of #2 and #3 are too crude. In the case of #2, there is a difference between teaching subjects that are not in demand and teaching subjects poorly. ITT is in the latter. For #3, at a good university, you may have some bad teachers, but the majority are usually good, and the overall experience is beneficial. This is also probably not the case with ITT.
- jessedhillon 10y ago
  How can we legitimately know whether an ITT grad is sufficiently equivalent to one from a traditional university? The complaints from the state focus default rates, but if there's a hiring bias against hiring for-profit graduates, then default rates are measuring the strength of that bias.
  - gohrt 10y ago
    What bias? You can't get a degree in HVAC repair at a traditional university. It's a different labor pool.
    - jessedhillon 10y ago
      Here's ITT's course catalog for their Oakland campus: https://www.itt-tech.edu/campus/download/140.pdf https://www.itt-tech.edu/campus/download/140.pdf I'll save you the surprise of discovering that Ctrl+F'ing for "HVAC" yields zero results.

h4nkoslo 10y ago

One aspect of ITT and its ilk is that the students often only sign up so they can take out "education" loans for living expenses, with the class work as a very secondary concern.

Blackthorn 10y ago
You're gonna need to provide a citation for such a serious claim.
- h4nkoslo 10y ago
  It's hardly a secret that student loans, intentionally, cover living expenses, and that enrolment rises when the economy sucks. Students aren't embezzling the money; living expenses are bundled with the (crappy) package. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304585004579415022664472930 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023045850045794150...
trentmb 10y ago
That's not unique to ITT.
- h4nkoslo 10y ago
  Hence "ilk".

grej 10y ago

ITT seems like an easy first place to go because of their shady rep, but I think the risk here is that well entrenched interests in will ultimately give bootcamps and other online training courses the same treatment if they start eating into the educational establishment's pie too much. We have to be careful of a slippery slope.

ryuker16 10y ago
Too late, some of the bigger chains have been bought out.

twblalock 10y ago

I hope DeVry is next.

bbarn 10y ago
I don't know if they're as deserving of the vitriol. I've interviewed and worked with several people with DeVry degrees. I can't say if it's sample size or just good luck or both but I haven't been disappointed with them.
geomark 10y ago
I went to DeVry. It was good. I was motivated, got through it with good grades, and had three job offers waiting for me when I graduated. Everyone in my class who graduated had at least one offer. Employers knew the reputation of the school which is why there were so many present on interview day and every graduate was offered a job. That was quite a few years ago so maybe things have changed, I don't know.

wallace_f 10y ago

This is just the tip of the iceberg with problems in education, though. Let's not act like higher education in the US is exemplary.

beenfired 10y ago

According to the ITT Tech Website they have now stopped accepting new enrollments nationwide.

electriclove 10y ago

Bravo, now let's ban the rest of the fake schools!

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Btw to avoid confusion I've seen happen when a new guy shows up in the workplace: ITT != IIT ITT = ~University of Phoenix, everyone gets in IIT = Elite programs in a variety of sciences, almost no one gets in

SapphireSun 10y ago
To clarify, IIT is the Indian Institute of Technology, a series of schools that are basically India's MIT as I've had it described to me by people that went there. I had some graduate friends from there while I was in undergrad and they were very bright.

ghshephard 10y ago

"Last year, it enrolled 45,000 students and reported $850 million in revenue". That's about $19k/year/student. Just to put that in perspective, a 10 day Cisco Network Engineering course from Unitek in the Bay area (last time I took one, great school, at least in network engineering) costs $8,200. The issue isn't the cost, honestly, $19k/year isn't that expensive, the issue is whether they are delivering value for money.

whyenot 10y ago
Something doesn't match up with those numbers. Tuition at ITT starts at about $45k/yr. http://programinfo.itt-tech.edu/cost.pdf http://programinfo.itt-tech.edu/cost.pdf
ryuker16 10y ago
Those courses are paid by your company as training or to accqure some cert to obtain a contract.....its not priced accurately nor intended for guys on the street.
- ghshephard 10y ago
  Not sure what you mean when you say, "Not priced accurately" - I looked around, and pretty much all the schools charge around the same price, if you want to be sitting in a lab with other students for 10 hours a day for 10 days with a best-of-class instructor. Lots of room for competition if someone thinks they can do it more cheaply, but the instructors are very expensive (they are the best in the business - and if you aren't happy with them, you walk out and demand a full refund at that kind of price). We definitely had students in the room who had paid out of their own pocket for the course. I've taken these courses both through work, and independently, paying myself. I would much rather give someone $8500 and 10 days later come out with some highly relevant, actionable knowledge then spend a year (or two!) of my time getting some "credential" - there is a pretty big opportunity cost to my time.
  - ghshephard 10y ago
    Also - put another way, not even including the cost of facilities, and equipment - I'm paying $8500 for 100 hours of instructor time. $85/hr (admittedly shared with a small group of other students) of a world class education, where every single second is optimized. Seems reasonable to me.

joshmn 10y ago

Are they preying on desperate students, or people who are considered "unfavorable" to learning otherwise? I know a few people who considered ITT. They all have one thing alike: they're not the smartest or most driven of people by any means. (that's two, sorry) I'm curious... What are their student's standardized test scores, as well as high school records? I'm sure there's a pattern there that can describe some their default rates.

ben_jones 10y ago
Companies like ITT specifically target military service members because they are: 1) In their twenties and looking to start a career outside the military. 2) Eligible for a variety of loans, grants, and other financial services unavailable to the general public. 3) If they are still in the military, they will have much lower default rates as the military takes debt very seriously (as a representation of character really). (IMO) none of these qualities are unfavorable to traditional institutions. Companies like ITT are 100% vultures. source: many friends in the military
- jcurbo 10y ago
  All true. The Post-9/11 GI Bill was a large driver of this - if you've done your time, it's basically free schooling and all you have to do is sign up. The govt sends the tuition money directly to the school, you just have to recertify with the VA every semester. (In the old GI Bill you got the money first, and the rates were different) (source: prior military, used Post-9/11 GI Bill to get my master's)
- ryuker16 10y ago
  Another huge factor is that laws aimed at these schools required a threshold of students didnt use federal student loans to attend. Army loans qualified are sufficiently different and allowed them meet that quota without having to go the filthy route giving hefty scholarships to attract non-suckers at reasonable rates.

pkaye 10y ago

This caption pretty much captures what is wrong with ITT tech. "Jorge Villalba, shown in 2015 in front of the ITT Technical Institute in Encinco, left the school owing about $150,000 in student loans." How the heck does someone end up owing $150K for a basic education?

known 10y ago

I believe many ITT students are from India.

praneshp 10y ago
I doubt it. Even if we wanted to waste our money there, the chances of getting a F1 visa is slim to none. Maybe there are Indians attending these schools illegally but pretty sure it's not large enough for anyone to notice. Do you have a source?
- ryuker16 10y ago
  There is a con where guys looking for a usa visa get accepted at a school with no classes. i wouldnt be surprised if some for-profits did this on the side for extra cash. Also, some foreigners just dont know any better and get conned.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

headmelted 10y ago

Reading the comments here has been really eye opening to me. I always knew that tuition was orders-of-magnitude more expensive across the Atlantic but now it's a bit clearer why. Here (Northern Ireland, but it applies to the UK as a whole), students don't start to repay their loans until their earnings are over a certain threshold, then repayments are proportional to how much they earn over that level. If their annual earnings ever fall below it again, payments stop until they're back on their feet. I can't remember exactly what my interest rate was but I know it was fixed BELOW the central bank rate at the time. Standard financial advice here is to max the loan out even if you weren't in need of it and just put it in a savings account for the interest (probably not worth it these days). Lastly, if the loans aren't fully repaid by retirement age, they're written off. So yeah, you folks are really getting screwed over there.

djsumdog 10y ago
New Zealand use to have free education. Then it became interest free ... unless you left the country. They bleed a lot of talent out to Australia, so if you move for more than 6 months they start charging you interest. It turned from being a good socialist system that helped everyone to being a forced means of talent retention. In the same way, American student loans are really aimed at keeping people trapped in industry they might grow to hate. Everyone has to pay the mortgage and all that.
- elemenopy 10y ago
  I think "forced means of talent retention" is an unfairly harsh characterisation. It's a pretty reasonable policy considering taxpayers have to service the debt, and people who go overseas stop paying tax. It's all very well to propose a "good socialist system" but if people pay domestic fees and then leave NZ they're essentially getting a free ride and it's the people who don't go to uni who end up paying for it.
- crummy 10y ago
  It's not forced though, is it? You just have to pay interest.
- deleted 10y ago

yuhong 10y ago

Just "ordered to engrossing and enrolling": http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160SB1192 http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xht...

zerocrates 10y ago
An "enrolled" bill is one that has been passed.

nsxwolf 10y ago

Why can't there be such thing as a good for-profit school? We buy the highest quality smartphones from Apple and Samsung after all - I don't see a lot of non-profit phones or government phones.

dragonwriter 10y ago
Phones tend to be a repeated purchase that people are quickly able to assess costs and benefits of and optimize. It thus more closely approximates the rational choice model under which free markets are efficient.
oldmanjay 10y ago
I think the main trouble is that the target market is largely young, uneducated, hopeful, and flush with guaranteed loans. Basically, a scammer's dream come true.
ryuker16 10y ago
Typically the get bought out by shady operators and converted to the same con game...extra bonus if they acquire some accreditation. Now that bootcamps have proven successful, many of these companies have bought them out too!

SFJulie 10y ago

Education is a small tulip: try to compensate unfairness of life by subsidizing a flower to wed, an housing, health or education ... and here comes the bubbles fueled by the greed of a few who have had the luck of being born lucky. In the case of tulip, it has still not be proven that wedding a girl that had an obsession for a foreign expensive flower was a good idea. And for coding neither the diploma, nor the idea of ruining yourself before either beginning to work has proven to be useful. Overvalued diploma are a scam. Education is partly made of a financial bubble that takes its non-productive toll on economy. I hope Europa will begin to fire its teachers in public shcools and stop the privatization of education alike. I hate to fuel bubble with my taxes like a Dutch in the XVIIIth century.

yamike 10y ago

I went to ITT Tech and had mixed experiences in different classes. All in all it would have been cheaper and much better for me to have attended the state university and gotten a BS rather than the two years at ITT for an associates degree. In terms of the classes, I had some taught by really great instructors, local professionals who were great about teaching skills that companies would actually care about. I also had some totally worthless instructors. In one instance I ended up standing up in front of the class and teaching everyone - instructor included - what polymorphism is.

ne01 10y ago

I don't like our current educational system and really hate for-profit schools like ITT, so I'm kind of happy to see them fail. Unless you really add value to the learning process, it is ugly to charge someone to teach them something they can easily learn on their own and most of the time ruin their curiosity! In the future more people will learn on their own and just take a free test to get a certificate! Oh and books will be free (or very cheap) with government subsidies.

WhatIsThisIm12 10y ago

As someone who graduated from an Ivy Leage school, and boarding school before that, all on full financial aid with zero loans, I count myself incredibly lucky. I also see the student loan system as incredibly fucked up. The worst aspect of it to me is that the most predatory loans go to the lowest qualified students, who are the ones who get the lower paying jobs. Top universities are the only ones with loan-free, need-blind financial aid programs. Yet they're the ones with students who would be most qualified to pay any loans back. Meanwhile lower tier universities charge tuitions almost as large as the top tier ones, yet send students to $40k/yr jobs. The students who need the money most don't get it.

ryuker16 10y ago
Actually these students qualify for a large amount of federal student loans due to poverty. Private student loan vendors are would never lend to these for-profit students with out collateral or a well off co-signer.

tomohawk 10y ago

Maybe they should have done what Laureate did. http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/23/news/clinton-laureate-university/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/23/news/clinton-laureate-univer...

bane 10y ago

One of the things that's very interesting to me is how information asymmetry helps drive people to these kinds of companies. I don't know everybody's story, but when I was just out of high school, there was no chance (I believed at the time) that I'd be able to go to a traditional school. I had bad grades, my family was poor and nobody in my family had gone to university except for my father, who had quickly abandoned his post-University career for more blue collar work. Wanting to try to make over minimum wage, I went to an ITT-like trade school to talk with an "admissions counselor" seeing if they would accept me (of course they would, for a price). I took a fairly simple "placement exam" (which of course I passed). I told the counselor I didn't have any money (no problem!) I was then shown a variety of ultra high-interest loan options which would guarantee I could get through the "program" (just sign here!). I remember getting odd, cagey, answers about the accreditation of the trade school, and couldn't imagine how I'd pay back a loan that large if I took it on. I had the presence of mind to "let me think about it" instead of giving in to the hard pressure sale the guidance counselor was offering, went on to work my crappy jobs for a couple more years before accidentally running into an old friend who grew up in a similar situation as me and ended up going the community college route. It was "real" college (for some value of "real" and "college"), was a tiny fraction of the cost of the trade school, and graduation guaranteed placement in a state school of my choice. That sounded too good to be true, at least the trade school had some kind of real cost associated with it. But I went and checked it out, it was all true. A.S.->B.S.->M.S. and now I have a career, no student debt and choice of great high-paying jobs. Later, while I was attending community college, a coworker was going to that same trade school, hemorrhaging money and then one monday came in and told a story where they had gone out of business, didn't tell anybody, and just padlocked the doors over the weekend. Of course he still owed all the money for his loans.

pault 10y ago
Was it the Art Institutes International? My mother taught typography and design there and I could tell you some stories! It, and schools like it, are very intentionally set up as funnels for government school loan programs. There were some good teachers there that did their best, but the corporate side was a pit of snakes. The labs were all outfitted with 5 year old technology, the teachers were paid peanuts, but every year the recruiter with the most sales got an all expenses paid two week vacation at a five star tropical resort. If you want to see the effects of the education bubble, take a look at for-profit trade schools.

rayiner 10y ago

Not a bad thing, but I feel like many public institutions at the bottom end of the scale aren't much better, just a little cheaper. There is a whole rung of public 4-year universities where the modal outcome is working a job that doesn't require the degree you paid a lot of money for.