What Career Colleges Have To Do To Regain Credibility

All of this stuff is so familiar after having worked at a career school. Unfortunately, in Texas, we don't have many public technical colleges. I think we only have one. Almost all of the career schools in the San Antonio metro area are for-profit. I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case in other Texas metro areas. I've only found two non-profit career schools in San Antonio: Good Careers (relatively new and owned by Goodwill) and Hallmark College which is just as expensive as the for-profit colleges.

I've only worked at one career school, but my former coworkers told me about their experiences at others: Sanford Brown, Brown Mackie, ITT Tech, Kaplan College, Southern Careers Institute, etc. They're all pretty much the same. They advertise during court shows, Jerry Springer, Maury, etc. with commercials targeted at minorities and single mothers. When a student inquires about the school, admissions reps will repeatedly contact them trying to get them to enroll. Their tuition rates are often astronomical even for private schools. A lot of the students are borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to enter low-paying fields such as medical assistant, CNA, phlebotomist, EKG technician, administrative assistant, etc.

At the college I used to work at, I had the pleasure of interacting with some of our IT graduates. They were required to have a year of experience after graduating before being offered employment at the school. Well, I can tell you that I knew more than they did. Whenever I needed them to fix my computer, I wanted to rip my hair out! If I only had access to the administrator account, I could have fixed the problem myself. They were so lacking in basic troubleshooting skills. I always wondered why our whole IT department consisted of former students. Could they not make out in the real world?