ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down • Hacker News Board

Re: ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down

#271

Post by xorblurb » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 10:32 PM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #130

donatj wrote: post #54

I went to a similar for-profit school in Minnesota who also similarly shut down last year. I still feel like they get a bad rap. Was it overpriced? Probably. Did I learn a ton and have small class sizes. Absolutely. The instructors had all previously worked in the industry, and knew their topics very well. On top of all that, after graduation their persistent pestering of "how many places did you apply to this week?"…

Just because you had a great experience does not negate the fact that for-profit college students, statistically, fare much worse. A common pattern I have seen: Person does terrible in high school, doesn't get into a good college because they don't have the drive or commitment to get good grades. They go to community college, and surprise, they again get terrible grades and stop going. After a while they want to go b…

Also, I have the feeling that a "great experience" is all relative.

I went to a public engineering school in France, for which the student has virtually nothing to pay, and could secure a job in ~ 2 months after graduation without trying very hard (I did an interview in two companies). I was debt free... all my life. I'm not even talking about a prestigious Grande École, just your random everyday engineering school, which you can find in pretty much every region (with often several different schools in big cities). An Engineering Degree is equivalent to a Master’s Degree, and especially well suited to work in ... engineering. There certainly also are private engineering schools, which some of them maybe are less selective or slightly more recognized, but they are monitored by the state in order for the diploma they deliver to have an official value, and they are still far less expensive than private schools in the USA.

Well, there also are unrecognized for-profit schools with unrecognized (officially) diploma, or even with funny teaching setups (students teach each others...) but I'm not sure they attract a lot of people. Given they tend to concentrate on only technical and practical stuff, its probably even less useful to go there nowadays.

To complete the picture, most people who follow higher education studies in France actually go to the Public University (and not engineering schools) and it is far less selective, so the attrition the first years is quite big - and also it can be less easy to find a job depending on the degree you get and your domain. However, the public university is also obviously virtually free for students (regardless of the prepared degree), and talented students also have usually no pb finding jobs (and at least no insane debt :)

Re: ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down

#272

Post by twoodfin » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 10:37 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #266

kajjffkk wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont want my school hustling me down the likeliest path to become corporate cannon fodder at ABC Corp when I'm trying to build a startup. Not everyone goes to school to "get a job".

Then don't go to school and just start your startup. This conversation is about government backed education loans. It's not clear why the US government should be issuing education loans at all, let alone issuing them to students who are very unlikely to pay them back. Or at least have their real income greatly curtailed for decades by loan payments. If you just want to get an education for personal reasons, figure ou…

Well, from some policy makers' point of view, having a substantial fraction of the citizenry owe the government tens of thousands of dollars it alone has the power to forgive might be a very appealing bit of leverage.

Re: ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down

#273

Post by chadgeidel » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 10:54 PM UTC

clarkmoody wrote: post #237

chadgeidel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disagreeing or agreeing with loan forgiveness, but to claim that going to college is a bad decision is really a poor choice of words. Everyone you talk to everywhere says that "a college education is the path to a good job" and "college educated workers make - on average - n% more than their non-college-educated counterparts". When these people (kids really at 18) graduate from high school, they are making th…

> claim that going to college is a bad decision Taking on the loans is the bad decision, in the case that the student is stuck with no career prospects and a mountain of debt. > they are making the best decision they can possibly make That is not true. Going to college is not the best decision for everyone . Many graduates are over-qualified for the jobs they end up taking. Many jobs that should not require a degree…

I see that I may be straw-manning the argument here. You are focusing on the loan and I'm focusing on college attendance. Apologies.

I think that the decision to go to college should be more than "a college degree will get me a good job". It should take into account the degree, the amount of assumed debt, and the current job market for these degree holders. I'm not suggesting those be the only criteria, but they should be included. (Maybe they are - I don't know)

Re: ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down

#274

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 11:05 PM UTC

Phlarp wrote: post #159

swalsh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went there for 2 semesters. I cancelled after one of the "professors" showed up hung over. The education was very low quality.

FWIW: I went to a "real" university (University of Minnesota) and hung-over professors / TAs in large lecture classes or their related lab sessions wasn't a surprising occurrence-- at least in the general classes that everyone was required to take. I had a math professor freshman year that explicitly canceled a lecture due to him having a hangover. Honestly this seems like a relatively minor nit to pick, as there are…

> (Having said all of this, the slip of paper has still been worth more than it's weight in gold, for me.)

A few thousand dollars? Some things just don't weigh that much.

Re: ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down

#275

Post by darkarmani » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 11:16 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #19

So to mitigate the possible effects of the colleges all suddenly shutting down they were told to put up a huge amount of collateral, which caused them to all suddenly shut down? That's quite a mitigation strategy the government has going on there.

They need to call it at some point. They might as well do it before the semester starts to get some of their money back.

Re: ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down

#276

Post by aianus » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 11:19 PM UTC

tadfisher wrote: post #222

cstejerean wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is, why should tax payers subsidize liberal art programs with no job prospects? Giving student loans in exchange for getting an education that will increase their earning power makes sense. Not only will the loan be paid back, but the increased earning power will also increase the tax base. But someone graduating with $200k in student loans with a degree that will barely qualify them for a $35k per year…

Taxpayers do this already: it's called grade school and high school. The public has an interest in an educated populace. I'm not seeing any direct correlation between the cost of an education program and the earning power of graduates from the program, so in the absence of that evidence, I couldn't say with any confidence that tying subsidies to earning power will do much at all to bring program costs down. If I were…

> I'm not seeing any direct correlation between the cost of an education program and the earning power of graduates from the program

In Canada, the degrees with high earning potential (HBA, CS, Engineering) cost 2-3x more than the other programs.

It's really quite aggravating because they charge you based on your declared program, even if all the courses you're taking are actually arts courses.

Re: ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down

#277

Post by eropple » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 11:24 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #269

tadfisher wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful what you wish for. This would basically kill liberal arts programs and the idea of a well-rounded post-secondary education. The incentive would be to transform universities into job-training programs. I know there is an ongoing debate about the worth of a liberal arts education in the modern economy, but there's something to be said about the traditional notion of education for education's sake, rather tha…

Maybe the solution would be to inject liberal arts into every curriculum if the college wants access to subsidies. Producing well-rounded citizens is very important for a functioning society, therefore, it makes lots of sense to create incentives to produce well-roundedness.

This should be a requirement, and my own liberal education is why I'm glad I have one of the very few B.A.'s in Computer Science that my university issued. I could have taken a B.Sc., with more sciences, more maths. Instead I took the B.A. with a greater focus on classes like literature, economics, philosophy, and political science.

Taking Calc III and a fourth science class is a lot less valuable to me both as a worker and as a citizen than any one of my economics courses. (To say nothing of my public speaking courses.)

Re: ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down

#278

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 11:25 PM UTC

tnecniv wrote: post #216

kajjffkk wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No more counselors - just use the online tools! N=1 here, but I got no apparent utility from the existence of counselors in high school or college. In retrospect they handled some registering paperwork for me, but they also planned my coursework for me as if I were the median student. In high school I had to press the counselor to let me take more AP courses than she thought was wise. In college, it was more of a ru…

My high school counselors were actually reasonably helpful, mostly when it came to college advising stuff. I went to a small private HS though, and they knew everyone by the time you were a senior. I had the same experience in college though. Heck, I'm an MSE student now and I don't even have an advisor because the one they assigned me left and I haven't been bothered to get a new one.

My high school counselor was incredibly useless, and quite possibly harmful. I also went to a small private high school (~30 students per grade level).

Her only focus, as far as I can tell, was to make sure we could be admitted to a UC. She spoke to us in 10th grade, letting us know that we needed to take three SAT II subject tests, and that two of them should be writing and math, while the third should be whatever we thought we'd get a high score in. She also stated that on no account should we schedule all three tests for the same day, because too much testing wears you out and your performance suffers.

I could tell that last bit was nonsense, but I believed the earlier advice and took the math, writing, and latin tests. The counselor bore a grudge against me from then on for ignoring her advice but still getting high scores. Come senior year, I learned that good schools usually required a science SAT II. Whoops.

I had almost no interaction with the school counselor besides the speech she gave to the 10th grade. I heard through the grapevine how upset she was that I'd flouted her non-individualized advice.

I had no "counselor" or similar role in college. The CS degree required a CS professor to sign off on my "plan", but that entire process consisted of me going to a professor in my final year, saying "I want to declare a CS major; here is my plan, all of the classes except that one are already complete", and getting a pro forma signature.

Re: ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down

#279

Post by flukus » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 12:11 AM UTC

tadfisher wrote: post #208

bradleyjg wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there may well be more bad (by whatever metric) for-profit colleges there are also bad non-profit colleges. And non-profit itself is a bit of misnomer. It is true that registered non-profits can't pay dividends to their shareholders, but they can and sometimes do pay exorbitant salaries to those that have control over them. As the gainful employment rule[1] currently stands it exempts degree programs from publi…

Be careful what you wish for. This would basically kill liberal arts programs and the idea of a well-rounded post-secondary education. The incentive would be to transform universities into job-training programs. I know there is an ongoing debate about the worth of a liberal arts education in the modern economy, but there's something to be said about the traditional notion of education for education's sake, rather tha…

> The incentive would be to transform universities into job-training programs.

That's what most people go to university for. That's how universities (at least around here) advertise themselves.

Re: ITT Technical Institutes Shuts Down

#280

Post by tunap » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 12:12 AM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #252

at-fates-hands wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And with most places paying overtime, it's easy to push that up to the 70-80K range I was talking about. I should've been clearer in stating that.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/welders-cutters-solderers-... The median pay for a welder is $38,000 per year. Only 10% earn more than $60,000 a year. In other words, earning $70-80k "out of the gate" as you say, is rare. A person earning a median hourly income would need to work 3200 hours a year to make $70,000 (assuming 1.5x wage for all hours over 2000).

Roughnecks make $60-$80k in the oil industry. No idea what a welder makes, but I'm thinking it being a specialized skill, probably more. They often do work 70 hour weeks, as well. Not much else to do but work, drink or fight when far from home in a camp full of men.

Throw "underwater" in front of welder and you're looking at a couple factors of 6 digits.