An example of what I've been saying for years...

I wanted to make games since I was a preteen. Yet I never thought it was a good idea to go to a specialized school for something like "Game design". I was skeptical of those commercials you see for game development schools, the Art Institutes, DeVry, and now ITT tech. To me it didn't seem right that a school had to advertise to get students enrolled.

Boy was I ever right.

http://gizmodo.com/how-itt-tech-scr..._source=gizmodo_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Don't be a fool for these private schools. I don't know how people manage to borrow sums in excess of $45,000 unless you're in a state with high cost of living and competition (ie. California). I understand that its easy to sign a document and ignore the huge sums coming in to your possession, of which you'll have to pay back with interest. That isn't free money! Its your future earnings that you will be giving back!!

I think the biggest scam ever invented was that of credit. People foolishly assume and act like its free money. They don't look forward to the future.

 

Uh... the article is misleading in places. They compare tuition rates against 'respectable public community college networks' and most community colleges I know don't offer 4 year degrees in compsci or anything close, so you'd need to go the state/private colleges which tuition is about 10K (state college) per year, not including room/board. Are they trying to tell me that college admissions counselors at other schools won't try to persuade you to come there? Sure, they aren't "for profit" and being traded on the stock market, but make no mistake, colleges/unis are there to make money else they'd stop increasing the tuition at huge amounts each year, or the new trend around here is to force students to stay in dorms for the first two years... for the college experience of course, not to pay for their high priced, new dorms they created.

I did go to DeVry and I thought it was fantastic. The big problem I saw was people enrolling in these weekend/evening classes expecting to just find a job magically when they graduated. Senior project came around and others wanted to assist me with programming and I said sure... and then I found out after 3 years they didn't know what a variable was. I am not kidding in the slightest. I offered instead to teach them basic programming they should have already known by now. Only one person took me up on it. They weren't there to learn, they were there to get this magic job. One kid applied to grad school for Uni of Kentucky and they said he needed a new undergrad degree because, well, he had learned nothing. Another person, a year later, I learned was still doing the same job she had before. The person who I knew took classes / projects seriously, go figure, got a job at a local hospital doing IT work. Go figure, if you learn something and apply yourself, you might actually get a job.

You get out of it what you put in. I learned a lot, I made contacts, I got an internship, I got a consulting job from the recruiters visiting the school, and turned it into a career.

Granted, I didn't go to ITT so I can't say it was awesome there. Maybe they were a horrible mill trying to rip off everyone. Paid for college books lately? Everywhere is trying to rip you off. Now they have unique courseware codes for submitting homework which costs hundreds of dollars, guaranteeing you cannot buy your book used anymore. Wife took a class at community college this semester... 4 credit course = $600, book for class = $280. Yeah... they are all out to make money. I guess I just get defensive when they lump DeVry in with ITT since I went there and know people who went there and got nice jobs (when they actually took the courses seriously). Slackers... not so much.

 

The one thing I hate about this article is that it has many pages of drama and only a few sentences about actually helping the students of the school.

 

There is the occasional bad school under every system. Doesn't mean all of them are bad.

 

Sounds like a great candidate for a thread... oh, wait.

 

My current job is in my local training sector and... well... yeah, there's dodgy organisations and there's great organisations.

If you get a good training organisation then this very much sums it up, I think.

The problem is that sometimes you can't tell how good they are until after you're in.