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.

I talk a lot of smack about the teaching staff at ITT, so much so that some people may be reading this blog and thinking that I am bending the truth. I also firmly believe in giving people another chance, if only to watch them fail miserably again.

Let's have a test!

The Idea:
Will one of the self proclaimed best teachers at ITT accurately grade writing assignments worth 55% of my total grade?

The Setup:
I am taking environmental issues and we have a choice of writing assignment for our grades.  We can either answer all the questions at the end of each chapter, or write a summary report of the chapter in our own words.

I tried one of each and handed them both in a few weeks ago.

Behind the Scenes:
Here is where it gets fun as I dabble a bit in psychology.

Paper 1
For the first paper I chose to do all the questions, but there is a catch. I purposely didn't write the questions with the answers, thus forcing the teacher to have the questions handy himself in order to grade my answers.  Just for added spice I also completely ignored a few of the questions and made up a totally random answer, and I copy pasted one of them as the answer for another question.

Paper 2
For the second paper I did a chapter summary in my own words.  This actually proved to be more time consuming since I had to go through more of the chapter to get the gist of the sections. I turned in a summary that was about 500 words, and liberally sprinkled with filler. The question being will the teacher actually take the time to read through all of these summary paragraphs for multiple students and notice my filler?

The Result:
Paper 1 got me an 85%
Paper 2 got me a 60%

At a glance it would seem that I got "caught" half assing the second paper, and I suppose on some level that's true.  But here is the kicker! I got a 60% on the second paper purely based on it being too short.  The only feedback on the page simply states that it's impossible to give a good summary using the amount of space I did. So he didn't even read it, he just gave me some generic low grade based on the length of the paper, even though I had to learn more of the chapter to write the summary.

As further proof, look at the first paper.  You know... the one that has copy/pasted answers for multiple questions and made up responses that don't match the questions.  It is extremely obvious this teacher is not "grading" anything.  He is casually skimming papers looking for glaring errors, and handing out generic grades based on the appearance of completeness.  Per his note, I got an 85% on the paper because I didn't write the questions with the answers.

Some examples:
Question 7 - Compare and contrast anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and and ecocentrism.
Answer - The preservation ethic has less to do with change, and more to do with wanting to keep things closer to what they have been.

Question 9 - Describe Aldo Leopold's land ethic. How did Leopold define the "community" to which ethical standards should be applied.
Answer - A land ethic is a code of ethics used when you are going to make changes to the land. Tree huggers love land ethics.

Just reading it again now makes me laugh.  A land ethic is a code of ethics about land...  That's worth an 85%!  lolz.

How are students supposed to learn anything with that kind of laziness in the teaching staff? If the teachers don't even pretend to care about the work, how can you expect students to care about it?

Not only that, but ITT has been taken to court before for exactly this same issue. Schools have been accused of artificially increasing student grades with this method because it gives them larger government checks to have students with good grades.

 

*update on this!*
Just got another email from career services, this time offering jobs at UPS! Great work for an IT student... moving boxes from point A to point B.

Just a quick update today.

A friend of mine who also goes to ITT-Tech got an email today from his career specialist. At first glance it looked like a pretty typical huge email of spam.  Career specialist is of course just a fancy title for someone who does job searches on the internet, and then copies the whole thing into an email.

Want more proof?  The guy didn't even remove the Indeed branding from the email, he just sent it on. Because an IT student can't do a search at Indeed right?

He included the "sponsored" jobs with the other jobs.  So not only are you getting crappy spam jobs, you are literally getting spam too via sponsored job posting.

And now for the cream of the crop, here are some of the jobs this career services person is helping a networking student find...  Hilarious:

• Inside Sales Representative - Want to be a cashier?
• Software Tools Engineer - You do networking, you know how to code right?
• Retail Consultant - No seriously, want to be a cashier?
• In-Room Dining Server - How about wait tables?
• Babysitting Job - Watch my kids then!
• Book Cover- Back Cover Designer - So on top of networking and programming, you obviously can do design too, right? Ironically I actually can, but that's besides the point. *wink*  

I can't make this stuff up! It's just amazing. You are spending $80,000 to have some idiot spam your inbox with jobs any idiot off the street could get. What baby sitting job is going to pay enough to cover student loans that large?

But wait, who was it who sent this magical email?  None other then the same retard who I got into a war with last week. Now it all makes sense.

If you were good at finding people jobs, why do you work here?

So about a month ago I got an email from career services, they wanted me to send in my resume for a critique. Normally I would wonder what they did with the other resumes I sent them, but since this makes the 5th or 6th time I've done this, and I have never heard back from any of the others; I just sent it.

Fast forward a month to today, and me getting an email from the same idiot who asked me for my resume a month ago.


Does this say professional person who cares about finding me a job to repay the $80,000 school bill I have to anyone? Ignoring the highlighted portion for now, notice this isn't even about finding me a job.  It's about signing something that lets them off the hook for finding me a job. "So I can let leadership know you do not need assistance in finding employment."

WTF?

Quick Recap of Career Services:

• I have sent half a dozen resumes to the career services department, never heard back. 
• I have never been offered a job through career services.
• I have been spammed with copy/pasted job searches from sites like indeed/dice.
• I have been invited to "career days" that consisted mainly of security job work and staffing agencies. 

And now these idiots are trying to get out of one of the biggest selling points they spew everywhere when they are trying to get you to sign up for classes?  What happen to your 70-90% job placement rates? I am in a networking program without a networking job, how do you determine that I don't need job placement assistance?

But wait, lets not forget about that highlighted bit. "Don't make me come to your class room."  Are you retarded? I am not a child and I paid to attend the class, what planet are you on that you think you can come and remove me at your whim?

Here is my response, which I had to re-write and expand on because my original response was shove your paperwork up your ass bitch:


It's just really amazing to me, at least it was until I looked up Mr. Shario and saw that he was a jerk off political science major.  Which totally explains why he's a low level career services person at a joke technical school. But still... don't you think your time would be better spent responding to my resume email, instead of sending threats about pulling me out of class?

So yeah... get out your check books and come to ITT-Tech!

ITT Capstone - The final course all students must pass in order to receive their degrees.  The capstone course is kind of like the final of a regular course, but instead of it being a test at the end, the whole course is one long test.

The first day students are given a packet with a made up scenario that they need to create a network for. I have heard rumors that there are projects available at other schools that are up to date, but at my school they use the same one year after year. This allows students to do searches for ITT Capstone, or CNS Capstone, and find a good number of pages with completed capstones ready to go. Which I am sure no one reading this now is doing.

Anyway, what is really impressive about this class is that it is supposed to be super important.  Students are always nervous giving their presentations, and the thought of failing and not graduating is there; then everyone passes and graduates, even if they did next to nothing.

Lets take my capstone for instance. A normal capstone group is around four people, my capstone group had eight people. This in theory should be a good thing, lots of people to do research = awesome results, right? Now the fun begins...

Bob #1:
This person came to class for about 20 minutes ever other day, sometimes every two days. This alone should have failed him, luckily ITT's grading system is a bit off.  He never turned in any work until the final week of class, and the work he did turn in was wrong and stolen from online.  I had seen the same work multiple times on the first page of google images. He didn't change a thing, just cropped out the other students names.
--This student passed. 

Bob #2:
This person owned a mac, and for weeks couldn't figure out how to open the word docs all the other students were sharing with each other.  That's right, an IT student about to graduate couldn't open a word doc.  To make it worse he didn't even tell anyone that he couldn't read anything we were sharing until the 6th week! --This student passed.

Bob #3:
The only thing this person had to do was the budget, which happens every capstone.  The laziest, stupidest person can always be found doing the budget. This person did the budget on a piece of paper, did all the math with a calculator, then transferred it to a spreadsheet.  This took him the entire quarter to do, the math he did was wrong, and to this day I can't figure out why he didn't just let excel do the math for him.  Insert data, insert function to add up the rows, done. --This student passed.

Seeing a pattern here?
Students did almost no work, or work that has nothing to do with networking, or straight up stole other peoples work....  and - still - passed.

These students now share a degree with me and are out there, looking for jobs, interviewing with companies, ruining the chances for other students to get interviews.  How many brain dead IT students from ITT Tech does it take before the human resources person ignores people with ITT on their resume?

Assuming you made it this far down, congrats, there was a lot of ranting here.  I also assume you may be interested in seeing the final result of our capstone project.  So here are the final files (power point and documentation) for the cns capstone of the TTI network.

Update! The files were broken temporarily, I have re-uploaded them for your viewing pleasure.
Power Point  -  Documentation

Keep in mind the only reason it looks this good is 100% because of me, I spent hours cleaning up most peoples slides and researching their information. And as I said, this network is terrible and would not ever actually work, and it contains flat out wrong schematics.  

These companies have confirmed:

Staffing Agencies - Because you want to do temp work for shitty pay, right?

• Aerotech
• Hire Tech
• International Rectifier
• Manpower
• Robert Half Technology < The 2nd Google result for this was "Robert Half Tech is a SCAM"
• Talentscale llC
• Volt Work Force Solutions
• Wired Talent
• Work Force Strategies
• Yoh

Security Guard Job - Good thing you went to college!

• Ace Parking
• Allied Barton Security
• Border Patrol
• County Sheriff
• Eminent Security
• GMI
• Securitas
• UCSD Security

Actual Companies - What this entire list should be comprised of.

• Bridgepoint Education
• FBI
• Quake Global
• Time Warner Cable

Other - These don't look like obvious useless jobs, until you see their webpages.

• Waisome Marketing
• MUZAK

Another day of crazy over priced classes.  Showed up at 6pm, class was over at 6:45! 

What You Paid

Amount of Class You Got

Your Picture Here!

If you are like me, you started at ITT because you had a bit of an interest in computers, and you heard that networking professionals can make good money, but where to start? ITT proudly boasts job placement anywhere from 70-90%, and all but promises you one of those high paying jobs within months of graduation.

Even at the low end, 70% job placement is quite impressive, right?  ITT must have a whole team of people dedicated to nothing but rubbing shoulders with big tech companies in your area, that way as soon as you are ready, WHAM!  Instant contact to the human resources hiring manager!  Right?

WRONG

As of this moment, of all the people I have met at school over the 3-ish years I have been here, no one I know has been placed in a job through ITT-Tech. Not a single person. I do know some people who have gone out on their own and got jobs. But they are the same people who could have gone to any school, maybe even none at all, and got that job, because they already had good working knowledge of the subjects.  Some of which was never even covered at ITT.

I don't know a single person who gave ITT their resume, and got a job out of the deal.  I don't even know a person who got an interview as a direct result of ITT.  What I do see happening all the time though is that someone at ITT will log into craigslist, searches "networking", and then copy/pastes all those results into an email, and hits send to every student in the program. So now 100's of students are now fully aware of what 1000's of people on craigslist already knew.

Is that what you thought of when you heard job placement? I didn't.  I thought ITT employed someone who would give me an inside track to a hiring manager, which would let me side step logging into craigslist.  But no, I instead get mass spam emails from someone doing searches I am fully capable of myself. But I should be fair, because ITT has actually sent me more direct emails with an actual phone number to call if I needed work...  There was just one catch...  it was security guard work, starting at $11/hr.

Imagine that brochure?  Come to ITT Tech! Spend $80,000! Find work as a security guard barely above minimum wage!

1. The amount of credits to graduate (180) is the minimum needed to graduate. --Not sure how that can be used as an excuse for me having to take more classes.  I've met the minimum required to graduate, right?  So why do I need, to take more?
   
2.  I graduated from the CNS course and then went directly into ISS, this “path” is different than a student who takes CNS courses directly into ISS. People who take option one need 96 credits for CNS and ISS, people who take option two only need the 180(I think, this was not answered).  --Confused?  I am too.  I started ITT with the goal of a BA in ISS, so how did I wind up on this other path?  Also how does this even matter? All the credits were obtained from the same school, with no gap in attendance.  All the courses I took were assigned by ITT, and are all part of the same program; computer networking, so how do some not count?

Do you like having your time wasted? How would you like to stop everything and drive to school, only to show up to an empty classroom? Ever wanted to just drive in circles when gas is $4/gal?  ITT can help you.

Over the years I have simply lost track of how many times teachers did not show up for class. The first day of school is especially prone to teacher no shows.  Sounds crazy right?  The very first day of class, and the teacher can't show up? WoW!

That actually happen to me the very first day of the first class I ever took at ITT.  The teacher called out sick, and was replaced with some random old guy who talked about his life for about an hour then sent us all home. Since then it's become the norm, and please don't think I mean to say teachers are calling out sick and there is a substitute available.

I would say 9 out of 10 times the teacher doesn't show, there is no one to replace them.  When this happens, the students wait for 30 minutes, then we all sign in on a piece of paper and leave it taped to the door.  That way we can say at least we showed up.  But that time you spent premium dollars on? Yeah, that's gone.

Last quarter my teacher no showed so many times the dean bought every student dinner to try and do damage control.  As if a few slices of pizza really replaces $100's of dollars wasted.

So take a good look at the above image, and ask yourself, do you really want to go to a school that is so desperate for teachers that they allow them to not show up half the time?