How ITT Tech Screwed Students and Made Millions (gizmodo.com)

When Barack Obama took office, America’s seven largest publicly traded college operators were worth a combined $51 billion, with more than 815,000 students enrolled at campuses spread across the country.

 The schools were flooded with with people seeking shelter from the recession, returning to school to pick up new skills.


Almost eight years later, the industry has been decimated.

The seven largest listed operators are worth just over $6 billion, and the most valuable company in the sector has spent the last two years desperately trying to become a non-profit.

 Two of the largest companies in 2009 are now bankrupt, and two more are in the process of being taken private.

A withering war on for-profit schools by federal and state authorities, combined with an improving economy that made trade schools less lucrative, has left the industry a shadow of its former self.

 It could be one of the defining legacies of the Obama era.

A president who protected students as it were...

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"A grim story about a company that screwed poor people, military veterans, and taxpayers to turn a profit." 

Gizmodo reports: By the time ITT Technical Institute closed its doors earlier this month, the for-profit college had been selling tenuous diplomas at exorbitant prices for more than 20 years...burying low-income and first-generation students in insurmountable debt, and evading regulators since the early 1990s... 
 
ITT collected $178 million over two years just in federal education funding for veterans -- even while the company projected 33% of its students would ultimately default on their loans -- and last year 70% of the school's total revenue came directly from federal financial aid programs.

 Gizmodo spoke to one student who "will now spend the rest of his life paying back loans for a degree that is practically useless," after compounding interest turned his $70,000 loan into $200,000 in debt. "

Like all of the former students interviewed by Gizmodo, he was placed in a job that did not require professional training" -- specifically, a game-testing position that didn't even require a high school diploma, while ITT "placed" another student in a $5.95-an-hour telemarketing job.

 Her assessment of ITT? "It was totally worthless."

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Petitions:

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