“I urge your department to work closely with the students enrolled at ITT Tech and keep them fully informed of the company’s intentions to reimburse them and provide them access to their transcripts and records so that they can continue their education elsewhere”, he told King.
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The company blamed its decision on the “inappropriate and unconstitutional” DoE requirements, which included a demand that ITT Tech increase its surety to 40 percent of its Title IV federal funding, or to about $247 million from $94 million, within 30 days.
The attorney general said the school was lying to students about graduation rates and job placement and worse when it came to their curriculum. “With what we believe is a complete disregard by the U.S. Department of Education for due process to the company, hundreds of thousands of current students and alumni and more than 8,000 employees will be negatively affected”, its statement said.
The university will open special advising for ITT Tech students beginning Wednesday.
As for the students ITT Tech left behind, they are left with student loans and credits that most likely will not transfer.
Department Undersecretary Ted Mitchell, however, said ITT Tech never made a formal proposal, and that the department’s “informal conversations” with potential buyers had failed. “They got students calling the deans and stuff and nobody knows anything”. Jasmine Nunez was also a student at the same location. He’d like to transfer to a community college, but classes have already started. Now that the school is closing, students could seek to cancel $500 million in federal loans.
Read a message from the US secretary of education, here.
Trace Urdan, managing director for Credit Suisse, said this probably won’t end at ITT Tech.
Under President Barack Obama, the Education Department has led a crackdown on for-profit colleges that have misled students or failed to deliver the results they promise.
“I chose to come and see if it was really closed and it is”, he said.
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The validity of student diplomas and education may be in question, but not all is lost regarding the thousands of dollars students requested from the government to pay their way through college. “I have no doubt that our decision to take action was the right one in service of these goals”.
