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

California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 325 posts

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#41

Post by splicer »

iamdave wrote: post #19
increment_i wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let me flip that around and offer that I've had "technical" recruiters fail their end of this transaction as well. One experience involved a recruiter who wanted a compete rewrite of a CV portion outlining a SQL project from planning to continuous implementation models I built. This on top of 8 years of other experience in data design and management. The recruiter wanted to pass on my resume because I had failed to i…

> refusing to hire a qualified electrical engineer because he didn't list AA Batteries on his resume

LOL! It won't be long before the majority of EEs under 25 won't even know what an AA battery is. In fact, I bet it would be pretty hard today to find someone in their 20s who knows what a 9-volt is.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#42

Post by wprapido »

dmix wrote: post #38
rdtsc wrote: post #18

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 ha…

Besides the financial issues that these companies created, the main issue is the quality of teachers. There are so so many of these colleges that the pool of quality teachers are almost all going to be in universities. I took a business course for a year and all of the teachers were at most middle managers, marketing managers, or long retired company-men from IBM or other big corps. They all just read off of powerpoi…

those who can - do; those who can't - teach; those who can't teach - lecture

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#43

Post by roymurdock »

For those interested you can find reactions from students, teachers, trolls, and the peanut gallery here:

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.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#44

Post by PhasmaFelis »

jmcgough wrote: post #34
electic wrote: post #11

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...

Depends a lot on the bootcamp, and how motivated the person participant is. Some of my coworkers are bootcamp graduates and all are fantastic. I met someone when I was at college who went to ITT and said that he paid $30k and learned nothing from unqualified instructors, he felt (and clearly was) scammed.

I mean, that was also my experience with my degree from a major university.

I told them I wanted to be a computer programmer, they said "Oh, you want a Computer Science major, then." I didn't realize until after graduating that I'd learned about electrical engineering and processor architecture and compiler design and lots and lots of math, but almost no actual, y'know, computer programming. Pretty much had to start from scratch to make an actual career.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#45

Post by ajdlinux »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #39
jmharvey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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?

App Academy charges its tuition as a proportion of first year salary.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#46

Post by Jach »

imh wrote: post #29
gdwatson wrote: post #3

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 pre…

The gist is that they let anyone in (and advertise heavily to try to let everyone in), regardless of their ability. They also charge exorbitant amounts that students can only pay because of their government loans. That might sound a little like the general complaints about college, except that they don't really offer anything in the way of actual education, and the costs are really high, even for U.S. colleges. So wh…

Do they really provide nothing resembling education? I once had a friend of a friend ask me for some CSS help for some assignment, later I found out it was for some University of Phoenix course. Ideally the instructor would have taught the principles of CSS so that my assistance wasn't needed, but instructors not teaching the fundamentals and letting students figure it out somehow (or muddling through without ever learning) is par for the course at most colleges. Presumably these schools have lectures, assignments, projects? What explains the gap seen by companies on the other side apart from letting students graduate without actually having learned anything? And does this really only apply to these sorts of private schools?

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#47

Post by buddylw »

rdtsc wrote: post #18

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 ha…

The quality of education varies between institutions. I graduated from DeVry a little over 10 years ago. I got a decent education (ABET accredited B.S. Computer Engineering Technology) and was able to put myself through school and get a good job. I could have done it a little cheaper in a state school and a lot cheaper with a community college, but for what it was I don't really have any regrets.

My only critique is that they accept ANYONE. This leads to a large number of dropouts. You have people that haven't been able to grasp basic algebra and they bust their butts learning basic math and then hit Cal I, Cal II, Signal Processing, etc and they just can't hack it. By the time they flunk out they've wracked up tens of thousands in student loan debt.

We lost something like 60-80% of the students we started with in the first 2 years.

That seems immoral on the face of it to take advantage of those people, but at the same time this happens (albeit to a much lesser degree) in all schools, and I was grateful for the opportunity DeVry extended to me as a student with terrible grades in highschool.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#48

Post by Finnucane »

rdtsc wrote: post #18

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 ha…

I worked for a while at a culinary school in New York. The students got a fairly intensive prep for work in a commercial kitchen. They got what they were paying for, but it was expensive, so whether it was really 'worth it' was debatable, in terms of payoff jobwise.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#49

Post by Jach »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #35
rdtsc wrote: post #18

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 ha…

Digipen has some alumni in Valve that worked on mechanics for portal and portal 2 http://digipen.edu

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.
Post reply on HN