This is my experience at ITT Technical Institute in Tucson.
I was in their programming and software engineering program. The introductory programming class was taught by an ITT graduate. He read notes verbatim off of a PowerPoint presentation and then assigned exercises from the textbook. If I asked him any questions, he told me to just look in the book. I complained about him to the director and she told me that it was the student's responsibility to teach himself the material and that the classes only provided a framework. She assured me that I wouldn't have to work with that particular instructor again. Some instructors were better than other, but this was the general tone of the place. One of the later instructors, who was actually a programmer, asked us every week, "Did you write a program today?" I get the point that it's something that needed to be done every day, but if I'm paying for the course, I expect the school to at least provide assignments that give opportunities to practice what was taught in class and the school did not. For the last of the eight semesters, I found out I would once again have the incompetent ITT graduate as an instructor. I realized that I was deeply hating the whole experience, not learning very much from it, and that the junior Associates lite degree I would be earning was pretty much meaningless, so I quit seven-eighths of the way through the program and I am still paying off the student loans for this substandard education ten years later.
Maybe ITT Technical Institute has improved greatly since 2004. Maybe my program was a weak one and the other programs are good. Maybe the ITT in Tucson was substandard and the other campuses are better.
My opinion is that this is a purely for-profit school which preys on young people who have no idea what post-secondary education is supposed to be like. I wasn't especially young and had a lot of post-secondary educational experience, so I don't any excuse for leaving this pathetic excuse for an institution of learning after the first week, but I wanted to pass on my experience and my opinion to any prospective students. read more