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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

#301

Post by ghshephard »

ryuker16 wrote: post #289
ghshephard wrote: post #92

"Last year, it enrolled 45,000 students and reported $850 million in revenue". That's about $19k/year/student. Just to put that in perspective, a 10 day Cisco Network Engineering course from Unitek in the Bay area (last time I took one, great school, at least in network engineering) costs $8,200. The issue isn't the cost, honestly, $19k/year isn't that expensive, the issue is whether they are delivering value for mon…

Those courses are paid by your company as training or to accqure some cert to obtain a contract.....its not priced accurately nor intended for guys on the street.

Not sure what you mean when you say, "Not priced accurately" - I looked around, and pretty much all the schools charge around the same price, if you want to be sitting in a lab with other students for 10 hours a day for 10 days with a best-of-class instructor. Lots of room for competition if someone thinks they can do it more cheaply, but the instructors are very expensive (they are the best in the business - and if you aren't happy with them, you walk out and demand a full refund at that kind of price). We definitely had students in the room who had paid out of their own pocket for the course. I've taken these courses both through work, and independently, paying myself.

I would much rather give someone $8500 and 10 days later come out with some highly relevant, actionable knowledge then spend a year (or two!) of my time getting some "credential" - there is a pretty big opportunity cost to my time.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#302

Post by tn13 »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #163
fennecfoxen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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; apparent…

Can you point out a country where a private student-loan sector is working well? One thing the government does that the private sector won't is prioritise the needs of society over financial results. Say, for instance, that "teachers" and "nurses" were underperforming groups of student-loan takers. Private sector would say "OK, stricter controls on student-loans for those!" Meanwhile the government would say "OK, but…

India. A hell lot of Indians (29K last year) come to USA for their Masters degree. These kids borrow loans from Indian banks at 10% to 12% APR do their M.S. and then pay that loan back quickly.

Even though MS is significantly less risky you need to factor in the huge gap between value of that in money in USA v/s India.

Market signals works pretty strong here. Stanford can charge you whatever they want while the F1 visa factory college charge a modest 10K for a 2 year M.S.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#303

Post by brianwawok »

ensignavenger wrote: post #276
brianwawok wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not everyone lives in areas served by a bus system.. Totally not related to the discussion. The rule does not say "If you live in a place served by busses, you cannot buy a car with student loan money"

My point is I'm not sure it is actually a rule- I can't find anything official that says that it is a rule. If it is a rule, it is a stupid one- but that is indeed a different discussion.

I agree with the rule. It's meant to discourage people from buying massive expenses with a loan that cant be discharged with bankruptcy.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#304

Post by SamReidHughes »

st3v3r wrote: post #282
SamReidHughes wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "invisible hand" has declared that it's more worthwhile to be a Kardashian than it is to be a teacher or nurse. What you propose is to guide society by deliberately lowering the pay of teachers and nurses even more. So are you saying that the invisible hand is right? That a Kardashian should be expensive (which reduces how many are available) and that teachers should be cheap (meaning we can afford more of them…

"What you propose is to guide society by deliberately lowering the pay of teachers and nurses " No, I'm not. So your response has lost all credibility right there.

I proposed increasing their pay, or letting it increase, and you disagreed, so how are you not proposing to lower their pay?

If you want more teachers, you can either increase budgets to pay them more, or you can use some artifice to increase the supply of teachers so that wages get suppressed. You implied having more teachers would be nice, with your comment about Kardashian. So your own views here are self-contradictory.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#305

Post by st3v3r »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #304
st3v3r wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What you propose is to guide society by deliberately lowering the pay of teachers and nurses " No, I'm not. So your response has lost all credibility right there.

I proposed increasing their pay, or letting it increase, and you disagreed, so how are you not proposing to lower their pay? If you want more teachers, you can either increase budgets to pay them more, or you can use some artifice to increase the supply of teachers so that wages get suppressed. You implied having more teachers would be nice, with your comment about Kardashian. So your own views here are self-contradi…

No, you didn't. You proposed using the "invisible hand of the free market". I told you why most of us wouldn't trust that idea.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#306

Post by mSparks »

ryuker16 wrote: post #272
mSparks wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole premise of this story has me wearing a tin foil hat. [tldr] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98[/tldr] Soooo many questions. so few answers. I'll start with my immediate thoughts. High dropouts are not absolutely a bad thing. In fact its pretty normal in all western schools that have zero focus on "how to learn". The "problem" is clearly earlier on in the education system, wherby students are reach…

Everyone prefers they look at community college which is super flexible, dirt cheap, and will accept anyone. There are also legit apprenticeship programs for trades. The for-profit schools have a decades long record of charging 10x community college rates, paying teaching staff poorly, and almost always having poor standards of education. If government loans were ineligible, most of these institutions would close ove…

->If government loans were ineligible, most of these institutions would close over night instead of trying to continue with poor friendly community college rates.

Isn't that true of any education system based on tuition fees?

So I found http://www.bankrate.com/finance/college-finance/myths-for-pr...

says: Relatively few recent high school grads attending school full time flock to the halls of for-profit schools. These schools typically cater to nontraditional students, including older students with full-time jobs, parents, military veterans, at-risk students and those who need flexible class scheduling.

So is this really about "fixing" schooling, or just "fixing spending on people who don't deserve an education".

Feels much more like the later than the former.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#307

Post by bane »

taternuts wrote: post #284
bane wrote: post #205

One of the things that's very interesting to me is how information asymmetry helps drive people to these kinds of companies. I don't know everybody's story, but when I was just out of high school, there was no chance (I believed at the time) that I'd be able to go to a traditional school. I had bad grades, my family was poor and nobody in my family had gone to university except for my father, who had quickly abandone…

I've known several people who successfully went the Community College route. It's a GREAT way to get started, in most cases you'll actually learn something, and it's comparatively cheap.

Something I've been very surprised about, at least in the CC systems in my area, is that most of the professors also teach at local 4-year universities, or are senior employees/contributors at major companies in the area. Very few of the professors I encountered were solely employed at the CC (mostly because the pay is terrible), but it meant that lots of outside talent came in to make the classes work.

I had far more terrible professors at the state school level than at CC. But I also had the best of the best there as well. So CC professors seem to come in somewhere in the middle in general -- very solid.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#308

Post by yuhong »

ryuker16 wrote: post #269
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…

From what i heard is that the big boys have bought out the decent ones and then proceed to scam the loan system immediately. Hell, some actually bought liberal art universities. Now that they exhausted the supply of trade schools, they're moving on to buying bootcamps.

At least there is no federal loan system to "scam" this time, and the private loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy. I should also mention that some of the schools were already going downhill anyway, for example Heald College.

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#309

Post by sanderjd »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #254
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly that. I told them I wanted to be a programmer, and they told me to do CS--I was lied to. CS is the only field where this happens, as far as I can tell. There's plenty of degrees that aren't really useful career prep, but they're generally well-known--no philosophy major expects to graduate into the highly-paid world of professional philosophy. But if you're studying law or medicine or architecture, you absolu…

I'm not so sure about this. I have friends who are engineers and lawyers and architects who would say that their schooling was a similar mix of foundational theory that is only indirectly useful to their career and practicum that got them started with the kind of work they actually do as my friends who studied CS at various schools. I guess YMMV?

Re: California bans ITT tech from accepting new students

#310

Post by sanderjd »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #255
acjohnson55 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate that you're getting downvoted, because I think you're speaking the truth. I had a similar experience as someone who was trained to be a computer engineer 10 years ago, but actually make my living doing modern web systems development. Don't get me wrong, I had an awesome experience in undergrad on all fronts. But it would be inaccurate to say my course work was particularly applicable to my actual pro…

I also think there's a lot of people who feel protective about "pure" computer science, in the same way a philosophy major might feel about their degree, and look down on people like me as mere technicians. They don't seem to realize that we need technicians, and they have to be trained somehow.

Ah, yeah, this totally comes down to the age-old (or at least, decades-old) debate about what universities should be for: higher education or job training? The "job training" forces seem to be starting to win most of the mindshare, which I think is a bit of a shame, but c'est la vie.

Personally, I think splitting the two roles into different kinds of institutions with different goals makes a lot of sense, and we already have this with universities vs. trade schools and community colleges, but (unfortunately, IMO) employers have consistently shown that they prefer to hire people from places that at least make a show of being more of the "higher education" persuasion than the "job training" persuasion. Sooo, yeah, you're probably right that in the current world, universities should just do a better job of teaching job skills.

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