The Education Department said it cut off additional federal aid to students because the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools expressed significant concerns over the college’s “administrative capacity, organizational integrity, financial viability and ability to serve students”.
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The company, based in Carmel, Indiana, says its move will have an impact on hundreds of thousands of students and alumni as well as more than 8,000 employees.
ITT Educational Services says the closings will be permanent and idle most of its roughly 8,000 employees.
The company blamed the shutdown on the U.S. Department of Education, which had stepped up oversight of the school and recently imposed tough financial sanctions.
ITT, which enrolled 45,000 students in 38 states past year and reported $850 million in revenue, has two campuses in the Bay Area, one in Oakland and another in a business park in Concord.
“The explanation that they’re giving us, that it’s the government’s fault, everything’s the government’s fault nowadays, you all have to come better than that”, Permillion said.
“When we learned of the closing of ITT-Tech today, our academic and enrollment began working immediately to develop solutions to help these students continue their educational and professional career paths”, Howard-Vital stated.
ITT’s website includes a list of articulation agreements with schools that accept its credits towards degrees. “It first really started coming to light in 2012 with the Harkin Report, which showed that ITT was spending enormous amounts of money on CEO salaries and advertising, and not so much money on students and their education”.
The webinars will be recorded and archived for ITT students to access at a later time.
ITT Educational Services CEO Kevin Modany told reporters on a conference call Tuesday that ITT was the victim of a “regulatory assault” and never had the chance to defend itself. The U.S. Department of Education also froze the school’s receipt of Pell Grants and student loans.
The now-defunct Corinthian College chain agreed to sell or close more than 90 US colleges in 2014 amid a fraud investigation over advertising practices. “We reached this decision only after having exhausted the exploration of alternatives, including transfer of the schools to a non-profit or public institution”. In 2014, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued the college’s parent company, accusing it of predatory student lending.
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The Department of Education, though, doesn’t want students to give up on their studies.
