The school operated 130 for-profit schools nationwide. In July, the company reported its new student enrollment dropped nearly 22% from the same period the year before.
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The college said the decision was reached “only after having exhausted the exploration of alternatives, including transfer of students to a non-profit or public institution”.
“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.
Facing a federal inquiry and cutoff of financial aid for new students, Indiana-based ITT Educational Services has announced it is ceasing classroom operations at its technical institutes in 39 states, including seven in Pennsylvania.
Effective today, the company has eliminated the positions of the overwhelming majority of our more than 8,000 employees.
ITT Technical Institute, campuses, the for-profit giant that enrolls about 40,000 students, announced Tuesday morning that it is closing permanently. More than 8,000 ITT Tech employees are now without a job – employees who exhibited the utmost dedication in serving our students. The school stopped enrolling students last week. The department notes that ITT’s financial moves have put taxpayer funded federal student aid at risk, forcing the Department of Education to increase its financial oversight over ITT.
ITT had been in talks about transferring ownership, the Journal reported, though there was some dispute between the Education Department and the company over how far those talks got or how realistic they were.
“Our responsibility is first and foremost to protect students and taxpayers”, said Education Secretary John B. King Jr.in a statement.
A Bloomberg report last month noted that the U.S. Department of Education had decided new ITT students wouldn’t be able to use federal student loans and grants because the company’s future was “too risky”.
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Other education companies had made overtures to buy the chain’s schools over the past year, Modany added, and ITT had offered to “wind down” its operations gradually if federal officials eased some of the sanctions against it, but he said federal officials rejected those options.
