It's all over for ITT Tech and its 40,000 students
By Ainsley Harris 1 minute Read
The for-profit chain of college campuses shut down today after two years of oversight from federal regulators, displacing ITT Technical Institute's 40,000 students and 8,000 employees.
Regulators have raised concerns about the company's recruitment practices, course quality, job placement rates, and more since 2014. That pressure increased last month, when the Education Department made ITT Tech students ineligible for federal loans.
"For more than half a century, ITT Tech has helped hundreds of thousands of non-traditional and underserved students improve their lives through career-focused technical education," the company said in a statement. "We believe the government's action was inappropriate and unconstitutional."
Current ITT students who choose to abandon the course credits they earned from the college, rather than transfer them to a new institution, will be eligible for loan forgiveness. In addition, a growing number of students—344 as of earlier this year, according to Politico—have filed fraud-based debt relief claims, through a separate process.
The Education Department, for its part, has learned from last year's shutdown of for-profit Corinthian Colleges. In anticipation of ITT's collapse, the department ordered the college to set aside $94 million, which will help defray the cost to taxpayers of loan forgiveness.
[Photo: Dwight Burdette via Wikimedia Commons]