California bans ITT tech from accepting new students • Hacker News Board

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#171

Post by colechristensen » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:11 AM UTC

duncan_bayne wrote: post #157

colechristensen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a very big difference between a private university and a for-profit school.

Educate me ;) Seriously, I'd be interested to know what you see the difference is.

Almost all universities public and private in the US are 501(3)(c) nonprofit organizations. (Some public ones are more or less an extension of the government and don't count)

For-profit universities ... aren't. They're owned and operated by for-profit companies, the accreditation is usually terrible and in no way comparable to other universities, and they deceive students into thinking they'll be getting something similar to a university degree.

For example, ITT is run by ITT Educational Services Inc

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ESI

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What really needs to happen, is the US needs to restrict federal student loans to programs on a whitelist of accreditors (whitelisting the accreditation organization not the program, like ABET for example) as well as restricting organizations calling themselves "institute", "university", etc. as well as giving out "degrees" without matching the whitelist.

I have _no_ problem with the concept of a for-profit university, but they're being allowed to exist with very low standards and it needs to stop.

In fact I think the whole university system needs to tighten it's belt and be made smaller and more elite. Too many people think that ticking a university box is necessary to get a job / to hire a person, especially when so many people get such low quality degrees.

I'm not even railing against soft degrees, but their contents instead. "Liberal Arts" ... if you deconstruct that you can get to the original meaning which might be rephrased something like "the skills necessary to live a free life" which a whole lot of university degrees these days do not do at all.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#172

Post by colechristensen » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:13 AM UTC

dagw wrote: post #170

duncan_bayne wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Educate me ;) Seriously, I'd be interested to know what you see the difference is.

The two big differences are that (most) private universities are accredited by some recognized body, meaning your degree from a private university will be recognized as valid by other universities if you want to transfer or continue your education somewhere else. Most for-profit schools are not accredited and thus their degree isn't recognized by other universities. The second difference is one of structure. For-prof…

ITT is accredited by an organization recognized by the US Department of Education. It's a shitty accreditation, but it's there. (Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools)

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#173

Post by roel_v » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:24 AM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #121

neffy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Usually you get to learn all that stuff, and you get to learn programming doing the assignments, and projects. But there are some places out there that teach a very theoretical course, so unless students seek out programming experience they won´t get it. Programming is hard, and for some people it´s hard bordering on impossible. A surprising number of the latter still manage to get CS degrees.

It does bother me that it's seen as normal that students should have to seek programming experience on their own time. From my point of view, I was "seeking programming experience" by going to class all the damn time. I feel like I was lied to, basically.

Programming is to CS what telescopes are to astronomy. I understand that this is not obvious to an 18 year old outsider, so in that sense you may have been misled by an admissions counsellor who probably didn't understand it either, but no - studying CS won't make you a software engineer by itself. At all.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#174

Post by crummy » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:34 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #125

headmelted wrote: post #119

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…

It's not forced though, is it? You just have to pay interest.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#175

Post by dagw » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:34 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #172

dagw wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two big differences are that (most) private universities are accredited by some recognized body, meaning your degree from a private university will be recognized as valid by other universities if you want to transfer or continue your education somewhere else. Most for-profit schools are not accredited and thus their degree isn't recognized by other universities. The second difference is one of structure. For-prof…

ITT is accredited by an organization recognized by the US Department of Education. It's a shitty accreditation, but it's there. (Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools)

Good point. I guess I should have said reputable accreditation. From ACICS's Wikipedia page:

"the U.S. Department of Education formally recommended that the accreditor's recognition be withdrawn. (June 15th 2016)"

So I guess they won't be accredited for long.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#176

Post by bbarn » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:37 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #67

I hope DeVry is next.

I don't know if they're as deserving of the vitriol. I've interviewed and worked with several people with DeVry degrees. I can't say if it's sample size or just good luck or both but I haven't been disappointed with them.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#177

Post by bbarn » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:41 AM UTC

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...

I feel like the people who excel after coding bootcamps would have excelled without them. Self starting, picking things up quickly, and looking for a good deal aren't bad traits to have in general. Lots of people I know that have crossed the "General IT dude threshold" to development via a coding bootcamp.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#178

Post by KennyCason » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:46 AM UTC

headmelted wrote: post #119

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…

In my case, after graduating I was 43k in debt and at 7% interest. I had to consolidate because if you don't you end up with 14 loans and having to pay around 1500 / month. Which is impossible for most new grads. You don't have to pay if your income is low after graduation by opting into "loan forbearance". However, this is a death trap as well as the loan continues to accrue interest! Needless to say, young dumb me didn't know any better until it hit 50k...

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#179

Post by gaius » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 9:57 AM UTC

wallacoloo wrote: post #140

rtpg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's also important that sometimes it can be misunderstanding the question. I know it sounds silly because it's written clearly here, but in a spoken interview it's possible an interviewee can miss a detail and suddenly think they're faced with travelling salesmen. Or are worried about I/O Of course in those situations, the "right" thing to do is ask for clarification, or think out loud. And an interviewer sh…

This is pretty significant. I recently had the opportunity to sit in on some meetings & IM conversations with a recruiting team at my workplace, and was pleasantly surprised with how detailed they were in honing their interview approach. One proposed open-ended interview question in particular (these recruiters utilize both coding exercises & open-ended questions, plus some other stuff), "What's the difference betwee…

At one company we were reviewing the interview questions we used for graduates, and we had to take one out about a hypothetical factory manufacturing widgets. It was actually a simple maths problem about widgets per hour given various inputs. But the grads would freak out at the word "widget" and derail the interview demanding an explanation of what exactly a widget was, what it was used for, etc etc. I personally thought that that was an excellent filter actually, but I was overruled...

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#180

Post by geomark » Tue, Aug 30, 2016, 10:01 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #67

I hope DeVry is next.

I went to DeVry. It was good. I was motivated, got through it with good grades, and had three job offers waiting for me when I graduated. Everyone in my class who graduated had at least one offer. Employers knew the reputation of the school which is why there were so many present on interview day and every graduate was offered a job. That was quite a few years ago so maybe things have changed, I don't know.