It’s been a couple of weeks that the college I graduated from is officially no more, and I’m happy to see its gone for good. If anything, it should be a big warning towards other private for-profit schools that operate in a similar fashion. Shortly after I enrolled in the ITT-Tech campus that I attended. I was told by another student that the school was on lock-down for a day because of a raid made by the FBI because allegedly the school was giving students all PASSING grades so they can qualify for additional scholarships! Additionally, I witnessed first hand ITT-Tech’s shady student recruiting tactics. Simply imagine a used car salesman. One of the biggest problems with for-profit schools is how insanely expensive they are compared to a traditional public community colleges or universities. This is were the problem lies with with these corrupt for-profit schools. Their goal was to essentially recruit new students who are generally low income, have dead-end jobs, and see the school as key to a better future. Ultimately so that the school can guarantee themselves the government subsidized student loans, by means of the student paying 3-5 times more than a regular college admission.
John Oliver did a really good segment in his show describing the current state of our $1.2 trillion dollars student debt crisis.
Aside from the cost, the majority of the education provided by the school was horrible. Up to this day, I’m still angry I wasn’t able to do much “hands on training” during class, even though that was one of their signature marketing scheme!!! I’m still pissed off almost 10 years later! For example, the fact that I wasn’t able to use a Cisco router during my Cisco class! The same thing goes when the time when I wanted to use Microsoft Exchange which was part of our learning material/project, yet the school didn’t even provided us with a working valid license to do our fucking assignments. There were other occasions were I felt like I knew more about the subject than the actual instructor teaching the class!
I may be an anomaly
Ever since I remembered I’ve always wanted to have career in Information Technology and like many high school students my goal was to go a regular four-year university and major in Computer Science. Long story short, I ended up dropping out of high school (12 years later I’m still proud of my decision). I knew then, it was going to take me more than four years for me to attend and graduate from a traditional university. ITT-Tech was there, so I enrolled and the rest is history.
Not everything ITT-Tech was terrible. I did had some very intelligent instructors which I did learn a lot from. The school certainly gave me the foundations of Information Technology that I use on a day-to-day basis. So one thing that I absolutely can’t stand and makes me furious is seeing other ITT-Tech students blame the school for their misfortune. If you really study, and by that I mean you didn’t cheated; read all textbooks, did all your homework, and took the time to learn the material yourself. Like this moron. Then you are the one to blame and not the school.
At the end of the day hard work pays off, no matter of the school you went too. I graduated from ITT-Tech in September 2008. My only disadvantage was the fact that I had over $40,000 of student loans compared to a traditional Comp Sci university graduate who had a lesser amount of student loan debt. I worked and studied my ass off through out my entire time at ITT-Tech. I didn’t had any problems finding a job after graduating, and was able to pay off my student loans about five years after graduating. I’m a Systems Engineer/DevOps, and I’m at a point of my career were I don’t have to look for employment, but rather people seek me to join them. Hell, I’ve been contacted by recruiters/hiring managers and with some even interviewed with; major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Sony, LinkedIn, Pandora, to named a few. So, I just shrug off whenever I see or hear idiots say no company wants to hire ITT-Tech graduates.