Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ITT is no longer allowed to enroll students who rely on federal loans and grants

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 142 posts

Re: ITT is no longer allowed to enroll students who rely on federal loans and grants

#81

Post by SilasX »

kosievdmerwe wrote: post #27
dangero wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with someone educating people and making a profit while doing it?

The problem with for-profit prisons is the misalignment between what's good for profit and what's good for prisoners. Where the prisoners can't "vote with their wallets" to counter-balance this misalignment. I don't see a similar issue with for-profit schools. In order to attract students they need to to provide good education and foster a good reputation.

I can't rigorously prove it, but I'm pretty sure the people complaining about for-profit prisons wouldn't change their minds even if there were a system of "staple $N/month to every prisoner and they can go to whatever private prison will have them".

After all, we have basically that system for for-profit schools and ...

Re: ITT is no longer allowed to enroll students who rely on federal loans and grants

#82

Post by SilasX »

swalsh wrote: post #26
dangero wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with someone educating people and making a profit while doing it?

The issue is that the profit comes before the education. These institutions prey on low-income people who for whatever reason couldn't get into public institutions. When the students graduate they have huge debts, typically larger than those that went to public institutions, but worse their degrees are often worthless. The accreditation for these institutions often come from companies owned by the same corporation. T…

>The issue is that the profit comes before the education. ...

That sounds like a fully-general argument against provision of any good by a for-profit business: "The issue with private farms is that the profit comes before the food." "The issue with private semiconductors is the profit comes before the computational efficiency."

True, profits do bring the potential for fraud, abuse, etc., but obviously there are at least some situations where that can all be contained. What's special about education per se?

You cite abuses, but are those artifacts of the for-profit part, or the "students generally don't have good information about what a given school will do for their career"? I mean, there are lots of cases of students at "non-profit" public universities who are drowning in debt from a worthless degree.

Re: ITT is no longer allowed to enroll students who rely on federal loans and grants

#83

Post by grahamburger »

korethr wrote: post #60
grahamburger wrote: post #49

A few years ago I had to make several hires in cities away from the main operations of our business. These were technical positions, but not really highly skilled positions - think geek squad level proficiency. Many of the candidates came out of ITT, and to be honest they were among the best candidates for this level position, or at least they interviewed the best. I got the impression that ITT spends a lot of time r…

How many of them did you end up hiring? That's not sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious. My experience with ITT tech candidates was the opposite. When interviewing for a datacenter tech position, the candidates were hit and miss on basic sysadmin questions, and seemed to have never seen computer hardware before. To be fair, rackmountable datacenter-style computers look quite a bit different on the outside from the more c…

We probably hired ~7 altogether. Some were great, some mediocre as you'd expect. Honestly I don't know that they would have been any better at answering the questions you referenced, but I do think that on average they would have done better than others who applied but didn't have any secondary education. That indicates to me that the value of the ITT degree is >0. Whether or not the value of the degree is enough to make up for what they paid, I honestly don't know - although several of them had used military money to get the degree so they weren't really out much.

Re: ITT is no longer allowed to enroll students who rely on federal loans and grants

#84

Post by nickff »

gertef wrote: post #74
nickff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is informational asymmetry in every transaction (as well as in non-profit schools); this is a red herring (unless you can show that it is causing a specific, large, unsolved problem). The current administration has repeatedly demonstrated hostility towards for-profit schools, and has chosen to use discretionary enforcement of rules against them rather than enforcing standards universally, because they know that…

"Department officials say they are acting out of concerns raised by the for-profit chain’s accreditor, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, that ITT is not living up to the demands of its accreditation. ITT is under threat of having its accreditation revoked"

Thanks, but I read the article. Do you have any additional insight?

Re: ITT is no longer allowed to enroll students who rely on federal loans and grants

#85

Post by ics »

FireBeyond wrote: post #61
nradov wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In principle there's nothing wrong with for-profit schools which train people on specific job skills or certification programs. There are some valuable skills that non-profit community colleges can't practically teach. But still the federal government should only support financial aid for such schools if they demonstrate a high rate of job placement for students who complete the program.

Absolutely - if you can be both regionally and nationally accredited go for it. But most of these schools are in the "credits earned may not transfer" class, at which point the only thing you have going for you is vocational (which has merit). But if you're a hybrid or a degree awarding institution that no other schools recognize, then that's a problem and there's near zero value to what you're offering (which isn't…

I agree with what you and others are saying in general but "credits earned may not transfer" might as well apply anywhere. Between state/city university system, community college, and top-tier private college I had a hell of a time getting any credits to go anywhere. (Including for very run-of-the-mill, non-"core", non-specialized subjects.)

Re: ITT is no longer allowed to enroll students who rely on federal loans and grants

#86

Post by nickff »

dangerlibrary wrote: post #73
nickff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree that "[t]he opinion that large numbers of... schools are convincing people to give them money and then providing almost nothing useful in return is so widespread now that I'd assume it to be everyone's default unless they specifically mention otherwise." According to the signalling theory of education and the opinion of many commenters here, a great deal (possibly a strong majority) of post-secondary ed…

Graduation rates at non profit schools are appalling. University of Pheonix routinely graduates less than 20% of its students within six years. Even if all of the benefit is signaling, which I disagree with, the students at many for profit institutions aren't even getting that benefit.

Many state colleges have low 6 year graduation rates too (as they vary widely), should they be shut down too? Is there any reason 25% or 30% are unacceptable, but 50% is fine?[1]

[1] http://collegecompletion.chronicle.com/

Re: ITT is no longer allowed to enroll students who rely on federal loans and grants

#88

Post by merpnderp »

nradov wrote: post #22
swalsh wrote: post #14

This is incremental progress, it's just one school. But a crazy step in the right direction. For-Profit institutions are a plague on our nation (high-cost low-value educations) allowed to rise up out of the failings of our strained public institutions (not enough capacity to meet demand). What really blows my mind is that this seems to come after the justice department discontinues for profit federal prisons. It's li…

In principle there's nothing wrong with for-profit schools which train people on specific job skills or certification programs. There are some valuable skills that non-profit community colleges can't practically teach. But still the federal government should only support financial aid for such schools if they demonstrate a high rate of job placement for students who complete the program.

In that same vein why do public schools get to saddle kids with an average of $30k in debt and leave them with the prospect of $8/hour jobs as many degrees do? Where's the outrage over public schools who do the exact same thing?

Re: ITT is no longer allowed to enroll students who rely on federal loans and grants

#89

Post by walrus01 »

korethr wrote: post #60
grahamburger wrote: post #49

A few years ago I had to make several hires in cities away from the main operations of our business. These were technical positions, but not really highly skilled positions - think geek squad level proficiency. Many of the candidates came out of ITT, and to be honest they were among the best candidates for this level position, or at least they interviewed the best. I got the impression that ITT spends a lot of time r…

How many of them did you end up hiring? That's not sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious. My experience with ITT tech candidates was the opposite. When interviewing for a datacenter tech position, the candidates were hit and miss on basic sysadmin questions, and seemed to have never seen computer hardware before. To be fair, rackmountable datacenter-style computers look quite a bit different on the outside from the more c…

Sounds like the very oldschool Novell "A+" training materials would have been a lot cheaper for them, and actually equipped them to identify fundamental pieces of x86/x86-64 hardware.
Post reply on HN