09-06-2016, 03:00 PM
rjmacs wrote:
[quote=Will Collier]
Wow. Surprising.
I'm well aware of ITT's diploma mill reputation, but those schools are a good resource for some people. One of the very best engineers I ever worked with was an ITT grad.
These for-profit vocational schools have become far worse than in the past.....
Exactly. ITT Tech and some of the other schools may have had a bit of a diploma mill reputation in the past, but had some good instructors and some of their graduates didi come out with decent skills. But with the opening up of even greater access to both federal student loans and private loans, as well as purchase of some schools by venture capitalists looking for much larger profits,, the schools became much more about enrolling as many as possible and less about having some decent instruction available.
As an example, one of my sons was convinced to attend one of the schools that was part of the Arts Institute chain for an animation program. The school had been acquired by AI just a few years before. The program still had a good reputation when he started, but just over the time he was in the school he could see the effect of directives from AI above to make more money resulting in the better instructors being let go and replaced with cheaper adjunct faculty. They also cut the size of the placement staff. In the end he did graduate and eventually landed a decent job, but people who started after him have been having even worse times. Last year AI was pressured about this by the feds, and decided to stop enrolling new students as of May 2015.