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California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

latimes.com

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Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#141
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not allow them to operate instead of force them out--make them pay for all defaulted loans above 8% -- that might make them work harder to get their students gainfully employed so they can cover their loans. -- not that I like ITT, I abhor them, and think that Bootcamps are WAY better in terms of quality education and quality of job prospects.

Yes this. The problem here is with the government instead of ITT in my opinion. If you are lending money to someone who is taking significantly more risk it is your fault if the person fails to pay it back and not of the consumer or the business selling the service. In fact it makes sense for the government to do better credit risk analysis for every college-course-student instead of providing loans for any student,…

This is in part because the federal government has decided that student loans from private banks were too expensive and so the government themselves should offer them cheaper, for great justice.

As such, the private student-loan sector in the US is no longer a going concern, and no student loans accurately price risk - a neat little wealth transfer to buy votes from students. It's also a scary credit bubble; apparently we learned nothing from FMAE and FMAC and just blamed big evil banks for following the perverse incentives. Hilarity ensues.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#142
Education is a small tulip: try to compensate unfairness of life by subsidizing a flower to wed, an housing, health or education ... and here comes the bubbles fueled by the greed of a few who have had the luck of being born lucky.

In the case of tulip, it has still not be proven that wedding a girl that had an obsession for a foreign expensive flower was a good idea. And for coding neither the diploma, nor the idea of ruining yourself before either beginning to work has proven to be useful.

Overvalued diploma are a scam. Education is partly made of a financial bubble that takes its non-productive toll on economy. I hope Europa will begin to fire its teachers in public shcools and stop the privatization of education alike. I hate to fuel bubble with my taxes like a Dutch in the XVIIIth century.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the downvotes? It seems perfectly sensible that the government should be selective about who it loans money to. Even more so than private industry, considering the money they're handing out is from a deficit that productive peoples' taxes pay for.

I'll entertain the notion, because I have questions and reservations of my own (powered by certain built-in and historical baisies as an American...infer if you will): What would the criteria be to determine loan eligibility for a student fresh out of high school?

GPA, extra curricular activity, criminal record, intended major, savings, jobs worked and the duration they were held, etc.

Of course, none of this is as accurate an indicator as a FICO score which is why student loans are federally guaranteed, otherwise who would offer them?

All of this goes to underscore just how destructive the "college for everyone" concept is. The government is making junk loans so that naive young people can pursue useless degrees and graduate directly into crippling debt servitude. Consequently, colleges have transformed into bloated profit machines, happily ratcheting up tuition in response to this inflated demand.

Sadly, reform will only happen once this system collapses in on itself.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#144

Reading the comments here has been really eye opening to me. I always knew that tuition was orders-of-magnitude more expensive across the Atlantic but now it's a bit clearer why. Here (Northern Ireland, but it applies to the UK as a whole), students don't start to repay their loans until their earnings are over a certain threshold, then repayments are proportional to how much they earn over that level. If their annua…

New Zealand use to have free education. Then it became interest free ... unless you left the country. They bleed a lot of talent out to Australia, so if you move for more than 6 months they start charging you interest. It turned from being a good socialist system that helped everyone to being a forced means of talent retention. In the same way, American student loans are really aimed at keeping people trapped in indu…

I think "forced means of talent retention" is an unfairly harsh characterisation. It's a pretty reasonable policy considering taxpayers have to service the debt, and people who go overseas stop paying tax. It's all very well to propose a "good socialist system" but if people pay domestic fees and then leave NZ they're essentially getting a free ride and it's the people who don't go to uni who end up paying for it.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because student loans are guaranteed by the federal government. Student can default and the bank will still get their money.

> Student can default Um no. They can't. That's the problem with American student loans. It's the only contract you can enter into under 18 and you can never declare bankruptcy on them. It's the most bullshit type of loan there is. In grad school I put part of my car on Student Loans because it was 0%. My car load was 5.2%. After I graduated, my student loans shot up to 6.8%! I quickly dumped all my savings onto them…

By "default," GP means simply not paying - not bankruptcy. If someone can't afford to pay their student loans, they probably don't have assets in excess of their debt anyway.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#146
I went to ITT Tech and had mixed experiences in different classes. All in all it would have been cheaper and much better for me to have attended the state university and gotten a BS rather than the two years at ITT for an associates degree.

In terms of the classes, I had some taught by really great instructors, local professionals who were great about teaching skills that companies would actually care about. I also had some totally worthless instructors. In one instance I ended up standing up in front of the class and teaching everyone - instructor included - what polymorphism is.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#147
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My tech lead was bemoaning a round of applicants for a senior position, where some of the candidates couldn't even conceptually 'get' FizzBuzz, let alone code it.

Someone I know (not me, I swear!) was excited to interview an experienced candidate with a fantastic résumé for a test lead position. Said candidate did not know what a unit test was and could not figure out how to write one, even after the concept was explained. I have no idea how this could ever happen.

Were they a manual tester? HR/Recruiters don't seem to know the difference.

Should they know about unit tests though? That's a developers job.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But...if you learn all that stuff, isn't programming pretty easy? It's just specific abstractions on top of the fundamentals you already know... (I don't mean to be dismissive, I'm honestly mystified by your perspective here.)

It's like chemistry being applied physics or biology being applied chemistry. It doesn't hurt and it certainly helps knowing what's going on a layer down, but you're operating at a completely different level of abstraction with a large body of knowledge to learn.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, these are problems that are present for some other schools, but ITT Tech is far worse. For-profit schools aren't even in the same ballpark as other types of schools, in terms of the default rate. These are businesses where the "admissions counselors" are salespeople who are told to lie to people and strongarm them into attending, taking out massive government loans and effectively stealing money from the federal…

Comparing a 4-year college and a technical school is heavy-handed. Neither share demographics, nor business model. As one of 'We the People', it is also disturbing to read 'stealing money from the federal government'.

As someone who attended ITT Tech I feel that their recruitment practices were at least somewhat predatory. The same sort of practice whereby used care salesmen will tell you what you need to pay per month without ever making it clear what the total cost is. All the while of course they knew that most of the money would come from federal student loans. These happen to be loans that the students can never escape. Buyer beware for sure.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#150
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

+ a $5000 upfront deposit. We* do the opposite and offer a 100% refund if the student isn't employed as a developer within 6 months of graduation. As for the original comment, some coding bootcamps are starting to publish stats on graduate rate/outcomes (a few of which are also 3rd-party audited). The industry as a whole still has some bad eggs, but it's getting better. https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/25/students-are-…

While I'm not really big on "Online Bootcamps", I'd like to see metrics or even success stories from Thinkful.

What real-world skills does a typical Thinkful grad possess?

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