ITT-Tech SUCKS

In case you've been living under a rock the past few days, the government told ITT tech that it had to shape up, and would no longer be able to get federal loans for students until they do.  Since that would require ITT to actually turn into a school, they decided to take the money they had and run, closing all campuses and leaving 1000's of students high and dry.

I've been researching things quite a bit, and personally, I plan to file against ITT as this scandal has brought to light options I wasn't previously aware of.

So What Now?!

This really depends on where in the process you are:

I Currently Attend ITT or Graduated 120 Day Ago or Less

If you were attending ITT you have two options.

You can try to transfer all or some of your credits to another school and continue on, which might make sense if you were about to graduate.  The government is also reaching out to schools near ITT campuses and asking them to take credits they normally wouldn't take. This limits your ability to discharge your debt. But keeps the train rolling.

Or

You can file for discharge and totally wipe away any federal loans you may have. Keep in mind that this does not affect private loans (so far as I know), and will essentially start you from 0 in terms of credits. Personally, I would choose this option in almost all cases as the outrageous price ITT charged is simply not worth the cost. You are simply better off wiping the slate clean and getting a better, cheaper education elsewhere. /2 cents

I Graduated / Left Longer than 120 Days Ago

This is the boat I am in, and it's tricky sailing ahead. If you've already graduated, you've got a degree, and the core value of that is not changed by the school closing. If you attended ITT, got a diploma, got hired as a result, and are more or less better off, you don't really have anything to do.

I've heard from this blog that some campuses were better than others, so you may very well be one of these people. If you went to a school more similar to my own, though, I would suggest looking into filing a borrowers defense.  This says that your school fraudulently took your money, and left you with a useless piece of paper and a mountain of debt.

Some of the big things the government has focused on before are things like:

• Job placement
• Salaries promised
• Loan manipulation

Other Questions

In case you haven't seen the new lately:

I graduated from ITT earlier this year, so I have had a few months of making payments on my fine education. It is kind of shocking, even though I knew it was coming, and I saw the huge loans month after month. I was also paying back as much as I could while going to school, which accounted for close to $20,000 in payments already being made.

The end result?

Nearly $80,000 in student debt to repay.

Most of my loans are federal, hovering around 6.8% interest, and they are split between peaks, sallie mae, and a few banks. Not only are the bills large, they are extremely inconvenient to pay off.  Peaks loans especially are a total mess that I recommend you avoid at all costs if possible.

How much do you make right now? Think about it, because ITT in all likelihood is not going to find you a job. Even if they do, you are going to start in the $15-20/hr level.

My current repayment plan costs $1000 per month and that's after paying back $20,000 already!

That's not a joke, that is how much they actually want every month for a decade. At that rate I am paying the entire price of going to community college in interest alone, and I am paying back fast. Let me say it again, the amount of interest I am paying in ITT loans could pay for ALL the loans at a community college.

Using a financial aid calculator, my estimated salary to pay that back "without inducing financial hardship" is $110,476.80. Let me tell you, I do not make anywhere near that, and I have a decent job (no thanks to ITT.)

Of course you can extend the payment terms of your loan, which will lower your monthly payment, but it also increases your interest.  So let's say you want to only pay $600 a month instead of $1000.  Guess what? You will be paying for school for the next 20 years, and will pay nearly DOUBLE for it. $66,000 in interest alone. Almost $150,000 total!

So one last time, can you afford to pay $1000+ a month for school? If not, you can go to a regular college for what you would pay in interest at ITT.

So I had originally planned to write an update for each week of the capstone.  In my mind there were grand visions of moronic behavior worthy of writing about each week, sadly most weeks were just repeats of the prior week.  Which still makes the bachelors program at ITT a joke, but doesn't make for a very interesting read.

So I skipped writing about it the rest of the quarters, and will just summarize now. Also, for the record! I got an A in the class, and to my knowledge had the highest grade in the oral exam only missing one question.



If are you just getting ready to take your ISS capstone and are super duper scared (lord knows why), I can tell you with full confidence to relax.  The bulk of your time will be spent doing two things.

1. You will be doing a bull shit waste of time power point every single week. If you are still nervous about speaking to a group of people you have probably been having classes with for the better part of four years, then there is no hope for you.

In general it seemed like you got either a 100% or 0% based on either doing a powerpoint or not.  If your power point sucked harder than an apple fan boy in steve jobs bedroom it didn't matter. So my advice for the power points? Screw them.  Slap together whatever you can the night before, run spell check, and present it.

2. Classwork project related stuff.  This too will suck up as much time as you have to put into it, and I saw lots of groups really slaving over this junk.  If it isn't clear by now, the capstone for ISS has almost nothing technical to do in it, and is almost purely based on filling out paperwork and other project management type garbage. The capstone also assumes that your school is not a pile of dog crap, and has constructed a virtual network for you to reference against the project paperwork.

My school had no such network, so we were forced to literally make up answers to fill in paperwork. 

My advice? Copy and paste as much as possible, and stop thinking about it so hard.  Just get something on the paper and spend more of your time formatting it to look pretty.  The teacher is obviously not going to actually check 6 different groups 30+ page report every week.  Hand in something that gets you in the ball park and move on. That's what we did, and we got an A.

That leaves only two other things to do in capstone, but neither should take much time.

You still need to do your presentation.  This is a total joke, the way the grading works out the presentation is only worth 5% of your total grade.  To honestly do the amount of work my capstone required would take a team of experienced people months to accomplish, and for a lousy 5% it's just not worth it.  Again, slap some nonsense together and just wing it, all those 100%'s for just standing up before will balance it out.

Which leaves the only thing that will trip up most people. The oral exam, which is worth something like 40% of your grade.

I actually really like that they did this because it shines a very bright light on just how stupid most of the students are. They all still pass of course, but it's something.

At this point you should really be able to just bull shit your way through the oral exam. If you are a natural talker then this will obviously be a bit easier, but really, you are about to graduate and most of the questions are pretty basic. My advice? Read over the questions that require real answers and know them.  Some of the questions are specific enough that they require a text book style answer, know that answer. The rest, I would just straight up make up as you go.  Your teacher is probably not that smart, and at the very least certainly doesn't know enough to really disprove things you say.

If a question asks what software you would use to prevent a hacker from doing something, make it up. How does this idiot know the difference? How can you be wrong when a question is that general? Oh yeah, it's an open source project called "no means no", I can't believe it's free!

And that's it, you are done with capstone, and never have to come back to this horrible school again.  /claps

The Return of the Window Lickers
Another Saturday morning of time well spent.  This week for capstone was chalk full of fun, and as an added bonus if you make it to the end of this posting there is an EPIC tale which I can hopefully find the words to describe accurately. But first, ranting! 

So it's week 2 and the class consists of a lot of make believe project management focused nonsense. We had to make up silly questions to ask the teacher about the make believe RFP, which he then answered in the most generic way possible; you know, since it's all fake anyway. 

After that came the lab, and being a technical school and the final course of a technical degree we did some really technical hands on stuff that really added value to my education. LOLOLOLOL. Actually we all went to lab and then wrote a single page about the fake answers the teacher just gave us, specifically with concern to if his answers changed our plans at all. Even if they didn't you still had to print out a piece of paper that said your plans remain the same and hand that in.

Then things got REALLY stupid. 

A secondary theme to this capstone is to try and get people more comfortable with presenting things. So every week we are given a really generic topic to make a powerpoint about.  This week we had to talk about a vacation we went on once, and what made it memorable. Not only is that extremely boring, but let's also remember that the teacher is one of the worst speakers in the school, and gives no pointers or feedback on any presentation that would result in learning to present better.  You stand up, you spew, you sit down and we move on.  Helpful right? 

No real surprises here, most people suck at presenting, or have god awful choices for font size/colors. Some precious gems combine both into one magical fail filled monstrosity. And then it happen... one of the really amazing students got up there...  REALLLLLLY AMAZING. 

Let's keep in mind that this student has passed 400 level classes and is about to complete a bachelors program.  This student went to Mexico for his trip, while down there he tried to fish.  But he couldn't figure it out, the whole reeling in the lure thing was just too complicated so his parents took the fishing pole away from him.  But it gets even better... so much better. 

That night his father makes a camp fire, which fascinates our star ITT student.  "What is fire?" he asks his father. "Pick up one of those logs son" the father tells him, so he does; burning his hands terribly and screaming in pain. "Fire hurts" he says, and his family laughs at him.

The next night the students father asks him if he would like to start the campfire. The student is some what apprehensive given the events of the prior night, but he agrees. The father hands him a lighter and some paper and tells the son to be careful and don't get too close because their is lighter fluid on the wood. I think we know what happens next, but just for lolz...  

He goes right next to the fire and starts the lighter, there is an explosion of flame that burns his face and hair. 

That's how I learned to stay away from fire - ITT Student

"That is how I learned to stay away from fire" he says, and his presentation is over.  Looking around the room showed nothing but shock. This is a grown up, he can't be serious.  But he was, and he was about to have the same degree as the rest of us. 

Capstone - Round 2 - FIGHT!

Here we go again, and the horror started to pile up the first day!

First - The teacher is one of the least technical in the school, he's actually a project manager.  I've had him for multiple classes and he's terrible. His idea of lecture is reading every slide in his presentation word for word.  One potential hilarious moment to come though, I noticed he has a class dedicated to "better presentation skills." HA!

His labs also deviate quite heavily from anything technical and usually focus on what he knows, project management. So instead of learning about networks and security, you instead write multiple high level papers about the processes and policies of IT. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what you signed up for. I don't want to write papers about IT, I want to be the guy doing it, which is why I didn't go to school for project management.

Oh and did I mention he assigns TONS of this junk? I am talking 3-5 writing assignments per class + homework + I still need to actually do the capstone project. My group printed about 200 pages of documentation the first day...

Second - Groups were picked at random. There was some make believe "real world" excuse given for this. Which in some cases is true to an extent, however there is one glaring error that I feel is totally ignored. In the real world, all the people you work with know at least enough to have gotten the job. Even the most useless employee at your job got that position by showing some degree of competency.

This is a huge difference from people in a class. Some of my classmates are down right retarded, most simply got tricked into taking computer courses because they had no idea what to do. A small few are actually interested, and you can cut that group down again if you want to look at people who are good. So how does it make sense to force me into a group with these people?  People who would be fired from any other job.

The final quarter has begun.

Have you ever signed a contract or lease and then spent the remainder of the time counting the seconds until you were free of it? That's what my final quarter at ITT feels like.  There is no sense of accomplishment, no satisfaction, and certainly no looming job offers.  I imagine it's similar to what a prisoner feels as he gets closer to his release date. No one gets out of prison with fond memories of friends made and good times shared, you just want it to end.