You have a situation where the quality of the thing (in this case teaching) isn't easily known ahead of time, so the success of the organization isn't dependent on the quality of teaching, but instead is dependent on the quality of marketing (roughly).

So now you have a bunch of organizations with limited resources competing in the same space, and we'd like it if the organizations who provided the best education were winning. And providing a good education isn't opposed to also having good marketing, in principle.

The problem is that the organizations that try to be good at both teaching and marketing are competing against organizations that are trying to ONLY be good at marketing. The marketing organization will tend to win over time because it's easier to be good at one instead of being good at both, and the organizations that are just good at teaching die because they are bad at marketing.

tldr; Teaching is hard. Marketing is hard. Both at the same time is hard squared.

The ecosystem for HVAC schools is a competitive one where the winning HVAC program gains on the losers through a marketing advantage, not a teaching advantage.

My only critique is that they accept ANYONE. This leads to a large number of dropouts. You have people that haven't been able to grasp basic algebra and they bust their butts learning basic math and then hit Cal I, Cal II, Signal Processing, etc and they just can't hack it. By the time they flunk out they've wracked up tens of thousands in student loan debt.

We lost something like 60-80% of the students we started with in the first 2 years.

That seems immoral on the face of it to take advantage of those people, but at the same time this happens (albeit to a much lesser degree) in all schools, and I was grateful for the opportunity DeVry extended to me as a student with terrible grades in highschool.

A few weeks before graduation an army of potential employers came and interviewed at the school. I received three offers. Everyone in my class who graduated had at least one offer. The education we received was solid, as evidenced by the demand from employers who knew the reputation of the school. I got a good job and paid off my loan.

It is true that the attrition rate among students was pretty high. Lots of people were admitted who weren't the least bit interested in attending class. Some even repeated a term a couple of times while they hung out and partied. They shouldn't have been there. If they were on a FISL they probably either defaulted or someone else paid it off.

I don't know what DeVry is like these days. But if I had to do it again in the same situation I was in back then I would do it. It opened a good career path for me.

I think, cost aside, I do have to acknowledge that without DeVry I'd probably have never gone to college at all. I was definitely exiting high school hovering over the cracks and ready to fall through them, I had no resources to help me even visit any other colleges, let alone navigate enrollment or filling out forms for financial aid. DeVry recruiters might have been sales people, but they made sure I was able to navigate the process and because of that I had 4 years to self-study and learn and came out of it at least able to say that I have an accredited degree.

Of the schools he had investigated, he said DeVry was unusual because it was trying to operate like a real educational institution.

Federal loan money has distorted for-profit and non-profit institutions. But it's depressingly uncommon to find for-profit trade "schools" that actually care about educating students.

My understanding of the for-profit institutions is that the able sort of division exists, but it tends to be a lot more stark.

After a bit more discussion I think it's safe to say that DeVry is (or was between his time in the 80s and your time) a different breed of school than ITT. They seem to be a real school that just accepts anyone. Drop out/Graduation rates be damned.

Soooo many questions. so few answers.

I'll start with my immediate thoughts. High dropouts are not absolutely a bad thing. In fact its pretty normal in all western schools that have zero focus on "how to learn". The "problem" is clearly earlier on in the education system, wherby students are reaching college age not knowing "how to learn", and suddenly finding its important.

Next up - the cost of learning/knowledge material. I know of textbooks from the US being priced in the multi thousand dollar range (or simply not available for student purchase). "Teachers/Lecturers" aren't that important (I say that having graduated with a joint 1st from a top UK university having acquired a lot of warnings criticizing me for hardly ever attending lectures, but I wasn't skipping the material, I was skipping lecturers reading from textbooks).

All that said, I am left feeling these stories are more about attacking education that provides chances for the lower classes in the US to become middle and upper classes. Nothing about this ITT tech story addresses this one way or the other. Where are the employment stats for those who successfully graduate? Where are the interviews with graduates? I just see a ton of hyperbole he said she said. And whenever I come across that I automatically assume its a political power based decision, rather than a rational "good for everyone" one.

I know that all sounds a bit confused - that happens with "immediate thoughts". Its a first attempt at thinking about something we haven't really been allowed to think about.

Why am I thinking along these lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Education was set up as a "production line" into large public institutions. But the politicians destroyed the "large public institutions", and education doesn't teach people to be their own institution.

"If you are interested in the model of learning you don't start from this production line mentality"

There are also legit apprenticeship programs for trades.

The for-profit schools have a decades long record of charging 10x community college rates, paying teaching staff poorly, and almost always having poor standards of education. If government loans were ineligible, most of these institutions would close over night instead of trying to continue with poor friendly community college rates.

Isn't that true of any education system based on tuition fees?

So I found http://www.bankrate.com/finance/college-finance/myths-for-pr...

says: Relatively few recent high school grads attending school full time flock to the halls of for-profit schools. These schools typically cater to nontraditional students, including older students with full-time jobs, parents, military veterans, at-risk students and those who need flexible class scheduling.

So is this really about "fixing" schooling, or just "fixing spending on people who don't deserve an education".

Feels much more like the later than the former.

There is probably a good pattern of going there but studying yourself and then get an official paper there (as long as it states accredited).

I did that to a certain extent at an average state school. Got grades from there but also used to study in depth other things I was interested in -- learned Python, security stuff, networking. It was really knowing those extra things that got me the job later, but if I didn't have the official paper, would have not gotten through the door (unfortunately).

But yeah accepting anyone might seem nice "we don't reject people like those mean state schools" but they don't do it from the goodness of their heart obviously.

I went to a private ABET certified school for an Aerospace Engineering degree. My class was maybe 80-100 students when I started, and at graduation there were only ~20 of us. Everyone who left early was also stuck with a metric tonne of student loan debt.

There are so so many of these colleges that the pool of quality teachers are almost all going to be in universities.

I took a business course for a year and all of the teachers were at most middle managers, marketing managers, or long retired company-men from IBM or other big corps.

They all just read off of powerpoint slides and rarely provided any valuable insight on their own, by design.

Mostly just a sea of mediocrity by people who were well intentioned but never made it far in industry so they got an easy job that's likely personally rewarding but not exceptionally valuable to the students vs reading a few books or any level of experience on the job.

And besides 50% of my class was Chinese kids who paid 5x as much as me in tuition to be there and had a poor grasp of English. These kids were the real target market. So quality wasn't necessarily the goal. Just filling seats and offices.

Schools like that are where the "Tighten up the graphics on Level 3" meme came from!

There have been a number of times I have sat staring at my monitor thinking that I just don't know enough to solve the problem at hand. That instead of spending days on the issue for someone better educated it would take hours.

Now that they exhausted the supply of trade schools, they're moving on to buying bootcamps.