…because you weren’t in high school.

A lot of criticism is (rightfully) thrown at the for-profit college industry. Most gladly take money from students and leave them deep in debt and unprepared for promised careers.

Surely, there are some success stories, but I suspect that these are people who would’ve succeeded on their own—naturally smart, very motivated and quite amiable people who just needed some sort of degree to get them in the door. But for everyone of these individuals, there must be hundreds that aren’t working in the career they trained for and are struggling to pay back the massive amounts of loans they took out to get their wasted education. 

Thankfully, one of the worst offenders, ITT Tech, shut down a few years ago after years of fraudulent activities against both students and the government.

As a interviewer and hiring manager in my day job in information technology, I’ve never once interviewed someone from either ITT or any of the other technical for-profit colleges that was “hire-able”. Technical interviews would show they lacked even basic skills for their chosen career, some even to the point of not being able to write and compile a “Hello World” program in their chosen language. Or they lacked soft skills, inabilities to communicate their ideas or thoughts or even to hold a conversation.

But that’s only my experience…like I said earlier, surely there are those that have found success via the for-profit education route. And, to be clear, my criticism here is leveled at the technical school genre of these colleges.  I can’t speak to experiences with online, for-profit universities such as WGU, Strayer or University of Phoenix (though these three do have regional accreditation, which is “more legit” than national accreditation).

That said, all this is just a long lead-in for a stupid photoshop that I made years ago that subtly mocks DeVry Institute of Technology, which now calls itself DeVry University:

My advice for anyone that wants to get into a technical job without going to a traditional university: Get an associates degree at a community college…it’s cheap and will be much-more-likely to get your foot in the door in a company as community colleges are usually seen as “legit” compared to for-profit technical schools.