Sure. What does that have to do with ITT, though?
That’s a load of bull. There is no such shortage. My son has been working as a developer at Microsoft for 27 years and is now in charge of a small group. He remarked to me a couple of weeks ago that if he were laid off (MS has been “laying off”, i.e. firing, about 10% of its staff every year), he, as a 49 yo programmer would have almost no chance of finding a job in tech. Fortunately, he did well on his options during the 90s, not so much any more. But the idea that there is a shortage is unadulterated nonsense. Maybe there is a shortage of people willing to work 90 hours a week.
Meanwhile, major construction projects all over the country are running behind schedule due to a lack of welders, pipe fitters, etc.
A DEGREE??? Try $2000 for Tuition, Fees, and Books…PER QUARTER (of which there are 3 per year if you take the summer off). All told, even a 2-year degree at CC runs you about $10-12,000 or so.
A long-time programmer is expensive and they tend to get entrenched in declining disciplines. Demand for C++ and C# is declining. Few 49 year old programmers from MS will have taught themselves Java, Swift or Ruby.
Your son may be one that has, but perception is tough to overcome in the job market. It’s good advice for most programmers to avoid settling into 1 job and 1 discipline for too long. That or move into management.
But as Sario pointed out, that’s not the area where we’re struggling. Technical schools are there to produce blue-collar skilled labor, which we don’t have enough of. The alt-right like to rail about companies shipping jobs over seas, but the fact is most of those jobs are blue-collar jobs that you don’t need a college education for. The “American Dream” isn’t to go to a vocation school and get a welder certification and earn $40k a year, so the lower class gets pissed that they are under qualified for high paying jobs and they chose not to learn how to do the low paying jobs. Bit of a pickle.
Our local one has an annual cost of $3800 if you live at home.youllstill have gas and food, but if you can get done in two years it’s about $7600. Not as cheap as I’d thought, but less than the tuition and fees at the four year local college.
A lot of it is actual time. Mrs KJdS got an AS in nursing from community college - it took 4 years and cost ~$12k. ASN to BSN at Grand Canyon University was another 18 months and I don’t remember the cost (maybe $15k? It was discounted and paid by her employer; we fronted the first class and rolled over their reimbursements from there). Arizona State University would have been 4 years and ~$30k.
There are nursing schools here that will give you a BSN in under 2 years for a little over $40k. It’s full time and expensive and not prestigious but you’re out and working 2+ years early and the tuition difference is only a couple months pay.
My first job out of college was doing job placement for recent Soviet refugees. Anyone with blue-collar trade skills was hired the instant they could form a coherent sentence in English, sometimes before then. But then the Soviet Union had very robust educational programs in the trades.
A friend of mine was enrolled in ITT tech and was sad when it closed. Then he became excited once he was able to enroll in another for profit school called Strayer University and said God is so good?:smack:
To work what?? I would rather starve to death under a bridge.
Mrs. L.A. earned her RN-to-BSN from Grand Canyon University. I don’t know how much it cost, but I think it was over $30K in student loans. And that’s with a veterans discount. Nevertheless, she’s working full time for a great home healthcare company. She loves her job, loves her coworkers and bosses, loves the company, and her patients love her.
Your local CC also may not have online or distance classes. The classes they do have may be oversubscribed and you can’t get for a quarter or three. And probably most importantly, getting a loan for school at your local CC is cumbersome and difficult. ITT Tech spent a lot of money on people who would help you navigate the loan process. (Your costs are off, too. In my state $4000 is a little less than a year of classes at the CCs. You need twice that at least for a degree).
The diploma mills offer a clear path with low upfront costs. (“Pay nothing now, two years, you’ll have a degree, and we’ll get you a job to cover the loans”). While the CCs tell students that they’ll have to come up with money (they may not have) for 2-4 years and the promise that the student will likely be more employable, but not necessarily gain employment. I can see why someone would go for the former.
I think costs vary by state. When I was going to CC in California, classes were $50/unit. I know that the local CC charges like $500 to $600 for a five-unit class, plus books, and I assume there are other fees (which also applied to California). The local state university costs about twice that.
Here are the current approximate prices for attending college/uni in California for one year as a resident:
California Community College (CCC): $1,104
California State University (CSU): $5,472
University of California (UC): $12,240
That’s debatable. When I worked in a retirement home as a cook, I was surrounded by college-educated nursing types who couldn’t spell their way out of a paper bag. And most of the corporate-level management types were also college-educated nurses and such who would send formal memos and such down to us, and those things were loaded with spelling and grammar errors.
That is a “college-level standard of literacy” these days.
If it’s not core STEM or the focus of the degree program (nursing), it’s just X number of hours to sleep through. Rah, rah.
The real cost to attend a UC is 34k a year.
Well, according to the Everest commercial I saw today (the joys of taking a day off work), the attraction is, “I don’t have to take classes I don’t need!” I interpreted that to mean, “Even community colleges are too academically rigorous for me.”
That includes housing, food, personal expenditures, and transportation. Those are costs you’ll have whether or not you are going to school.
Or you could interpret that to mean “I don’t have to pay for classes that aren’t necessary for the job that I want.” Or “It will take me less time to get through school so I can start earning money sooner to support my family.”
Don’t get me wrong, I think these schools are horrible and they cheat and con their students both financially and academically. But I don’t think that the people who have fallen for this scam are inherently stupid and lazy.
There was a PBS Frontline on private colleges this week. Did anyone else see it?
Anyone else read The Bell Jar? The POV character, who is really Sylvia Plath, even though she goes by the name Esther, is a student at a very prestigious university, who goes into a downward spiral of clinical depression (which might actually be manic depression, since at one point she’s awake for something like six days); one early incident is when she looks at the bulletin for the community college where her mother teaches, and realizes that the course of study there is actually just as vigorous as the one at her school, with fewer outs and loopholes, and sort of, creative extra credit BS that get you out of actual work, so the CC students may actually work harder than the elite students.