The beginning of the school year, the time you spend at least a paycheck on books you may use, the daily battle for parking spots, and the time you’re still calculating how many absences each class will allow before your grades take a hit.
Fall semester can be tough, but I suppose we have it easy compared to 35,000 students prepared to to complete their fall semester at ITT Tech, which as of September 6th, no longer exists. ITT Tech announced that they would be closing their 138 campuses in 39 states due to multiple federal probes and uncertain accreditation standings. 150 students are left stranded at the ITT campus here in Albany.
A real picture of a real student really reading a real notice about her school really not existing anymore
How did this happen you ask? Well these for-profit schools such as ITT Tech, Bryant and Stratton, and DeVry University take students on financial loans. In fact they take on 31% of our country’s student loans but only help 13% of our students. The fact is that these non-profit schools are crazy expensive and are providing very little return to the economy. They can cost 4x as much as a community college and 2x as much as a state university, and they prey on the lower income class, which is probably definitely why they are getting shut down.
We have all seen the commercials, the ones that always show ITT Tech grads living great successful lives even though they’re a single parent of 6 kids and a lizard and how you can succeed too if you just pick up the phone and enroll in this online university! Everyone’s doing so great! Well, it’s not that those success stories are made up, they’re real, they’re just the 2% of the students that graduated and actually found a job, the rest are not advertised on tv.
With the low rate of students coming out with degrees and not paying off their student loans, the government decided to not allow ITT Tech to enroll any new students using federal aid. Unfortunately 80% of the school’s revenue comes from federal aid programs. That’s like telling Yankee Candle that they can’t sell to women over the age of 45.
The end result? The school closed (and so would Yankee Candle) because they are a for-profit business and with no profit there is no business. This may only be the beginning for for-profit schools closing, but the good news is students will either be able to apply to have their loans forgiven or they can have their credits transferred to a community college so they can continue their education. Possibly somewhere else like, EveRy?