http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/for-profit-college-student-debt
The folks who walked through Tressie McMillan Cottom's door at an ITT Technical Institute campus in North Carolina were desperate. They had graduated from struggling high schools in low-income neighborhoods. They'd worked crappy jobs. Many were single mothers determined to make better lives for their children. "We blocked off a corner, and that's where we would put the car seats and the strollers," she recalls. "They would bring their babies with them and we'd encourage them to do so, because this is about building motivation and urgency."
McMillan Cottom now studies education issues at the University of California-Davis' Center for Poverty Research, but back then her job was to sign up people who'd stopped in for information, often after seeing one of the TV ads in which ITT graduates rave about recession-proof jobs. The idea was to prey on their anxieties—and to close the deal fast. Her title was "enrollment counselor," but she felt uncomfortable calling herself one, because she quickly realized she couldn't act in the best interest of the students. "I was told explicitly that we don't enroll and we don't admit: We are a sales force."
After six months at ITT Tech, McMillan Cottom quit. That same day, she called up every one of the students she'd enrolled and gave them the phone number for the local community college.
i hope she didn't sign a non-disclose form although what she did is patriotic it would also be illegal if that form were signed, business has all kinds of unscrupulous tactics to cover their butts while ripping yours.
don't know if there is but there should be some kind of anti trust act that covers students such as the one republicans are trying to kill "CONSUMER REGULATORY"
The folks who walked through Tressie McMillan Cottom's door at an ITT Technical Institute campus in North Carolina were desperate. They had graduated from struggling high schools in low-income neighborhoods. They'd worked crappy jobs. Many were single mothers determined to make better lives for their children. "We blocked off a corner, and that's where we would put the car seats and the strollers," she recalls. "They would bring their babies with them and we'd encourage them to do so, because this is about building motivation and urgency."
McMillan Cottom now studies education issues at the University of California-Davis' Center for Poverty Research, but back then her job was to sign up people who'd stopped in for information, often after seeing one of the TV ads in which ITT graduates rave about recession-proof jobs. The idea was to prey on their anxieties—and to close the deal fast. Her title was "enrollment counselor," but she felt uncomfortable calling herself one, because she quickly realized she couldn't act in the best interest of the students. "I was told explicitly that we don't enroll and we don't admit: We are a sales force."
After six months at ITT Tech, McMillan Cottom quit. That same day, she called up every one of the students she'd enrolled and gave them the phone number for the local community college.
i hope she didn't sign a non-disclose form although what she did is patriotic it would also be illegal if that form were signed, business has all kinds of unscrupulous tactics to cover their butts while ripping yours.
don't know if there is but there should be some kind of anti trust act that covers students such as the one republicans are trying to kill "CONSUMER REGULATORY"
With 147 campuses and more than 60,000 students nationwide, ITT Educational Services(which operates both ITT Tech and the smaller Daniel Webster College) is one of the largest companies in the burgeoning for-profit college industry, which now enrolls up to 13 percentof higher-education students. ITT is also the most profitable of the big industry players: Its revenue has nearly doubled over the past seven years, closing in on $1.3 billion last year, when CEO Kevin Modany's compensation topped $8 million.
this is the thing that gets most people you pay exhorbitant fees to get a specialized education but instead you get cripled before you enter the work force only difference in them and named colleges is the tuition price.
A 2012 investigation led by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) singled out ITT for employing "some of the most disturbing recruiting tactics among the companies examined." A former ITT recruiter told the Senate education committee that she used and taught a process called the "pain funnel," in which admissions officers would ask students increasingly probing questions about where their lives were going wrong. Properly used, she said, it would "bring a prospect to their inner child, an emotional place intended to have the prospect say, 'Yes, I will enroll.'"For-profit schools recruit heavily in low-income communities, and most students finance their education with a mix of federal Pell grants and federal student loans. But government-backed student loans max out at $12,500 per school year, and tuition at for-profits can go much higher; at ITT Tech it runs up to $25,000. What's more, for-profit colleges can only receive 90 percent of their revenue from government money. For the remaining 10 percent, they count on veterans—GI Bill money counts as outside funds—as well as scholarships and private loans.After students maxed out their federal grants and loans, there was typically an outstanding tuition balance of several thousand dollars. Jennifer says she was given weekly reports detailing how much money students on her roster owed. She would pull them from class and present them with a stark choice: get kicked out of school or make a payment on the spot.
is it any wonder why Americans are so far behind every othe country in academics, the educational institutions are not trying to educate they are as advertised "FOR PROFIT" at your expense.
Jennifer says the career services office at her campus wasn't much help; students told her they were simply given a printout from Monster.com. (ITT says its career counselors connect students with a range of job services and also help them write résumés, find leads, and arrange interviews.) By the time she was laid off, Jennifer believed the college "left students in worse situations than they were to begin with."It's not just whistleblowers who are complaining about ITT. There's an entire website,myittexperience.com, dedicated to stories from disappointed alumni. That's how we found Margie Donaldson, a 38-year-old who says her dream has always been to get a college degree and work in corporate America: "Especially being a little black girl in the city of Detroit, [a degree] was everything to me."Donaldson was making nearly $80,000 packing parts at Chrysler when the company, struggling to survive the recession, offered her a buyout. She decided to use it to get the college degree that she never finished 13 years before. Five years later, she is $75,000 in debt and can't find a full-time job despite her B.A. in criminal justice from ITT.
i might have missed it but didn't see anything about the caliber of education one receives from these grifters.
