For the time being, I have done all that I can do. I anticipate my Borrowers Defense for Repayment will be denied. For that reason, yesterday, I submitted an intake on https://predatorystudentlending.org/. I am sure they are as backlogged with requests for help as is the ED with Borrowers Defense for Repayment, so *maybe, both will get to my paperwork at the same time.

I believe that my dates of attendance at ITT are old enough to have ramifications for other folks that attended ITT into, and throughout the 1990s. For that reason, I think my DTR going to be scrutinized much more than more recent ones. I am sure that they will look over my loan payment history over the years, also. And then blammo, they will reject it.

I’ve never thought this was going to be a simple process.

I went to ITT because I saw an ad on TV. ITT was also advertising heavily in my local paper at the time also, though. I found this particular advertisement for ITT in the San Diego Union Tribune archives. This is around the time I attended at that location.

Looking at the ad, I thought that the name was possibly fake, and/or I would be left wondering who the mysterious Mr. Mayo was, and if he really existed. As it turns out, Mr. Mayo was real, and was a named defendant in at least one class action case against ITT Educational Services.

The curious case of Mr. Mayo has been solved.

If you question how predatory ITT has been over their history, ie you think this is just a 2000’s issue then this post is for you.

If you question how predatory ITT has been over their history, if you think this is just a 2000’s issue. This is from a report published in 1995 on tuition costs.

This specific location is in Arkansas. Now, the first thing I DONT think of when I think of Arkansas, is folks that can afford $16,732/year for school in 1995.

Yesterday, I found a cached linked.in page where someone had not accounted for the fact that ITT had closed. Meaning, If you were to locate the page for this person, it now reflects the fact that ITT closed in 2016. That person has also changed their job description slightly.

I want to share both images.

Here is the first one, the cached one.

Here is the second, updated, one.

I am pretty sure I saw references to “master recruiter” in the ITT docs.

I’m just going to stop there, I can’t judge.

The Internet has made it easier than ever to find people and information. It’s truly miraculous, in that regard. For instance, linked.in is like Facebook but for jobs. Ever wonder what happened to all the people that worked at ACME rivets in 1976? Go to linked.in, they’re all there.

Anyway, I’ve started looking for people like me. Did you go to ITT in San Diego in the late 1980’s? If so, I would like to talk.

If you went through the ITT documents, there was a lot of emails about GE, or Gainful Employment. The Gainful Employment rule was put into place by the Obama administration, but was rescinded under Trump.

The “gainful employment” definition was established in regulations during the Obama Administration to stop program abuse occurring largely in the career college sector.  The Obama Administration’s gainful employment regulations were short-lived. One of the first regulatory initiatives of the Trump Administration was to convene a negotiated rulemaking panel regarding the future of the gainful employment regulations, which led to the termination of the Obama-era regulations in July 2019.

The Obama Administration developed the controversial regulations out of a concern that a significant number of gainful employment programs were not providing students the skills needed to gain employment in the occupation for which a program was supposedly designed.  Further, there was concern that the jobs students got were low-paying, and thus not worth the expense of the education, leaving many of these students with debt on which they often defaulted. Thus, the gainful employment regulations were designed to ensure that students don’t take on large amounts of debt for training programs that lead to jobs with earnings too low for them to repay their loans.

Credit: https://www.naicu.edu/policy-advocacy/issue-brief-index/regulation/gainful-employment

Todd Rokita, who is the current Attorney General of Indiana (where ITT had a ginormous footprint, 12000 students when they closed), lobbied against Gainful Employment, while he was a United States Representative. This guy is dirty.

It’s in the video. I was amazed to see that this douche was now AG.

OK, I reallllllly wanted to give this guy the benefit of the doubt, so I was like, okay, I will google him. Nah, folks, he’s still a douche.

https://www.google.com/search?q=todd+rokita+gainful+employment

Here’s a job posting from the 1980s for an Electronic Engineering Technology Instructor. Apparently, two years of experience working at 7-11 (no knock on 7-11) was all that was needed to get a job there. Can’t make this shit up, folks. I assure you that if I had had ANY idea that this was the kind of school that was being ran, they would have never have gotten a cent from me. Not a single red penny.

I went to ITT in California.  We had the HEA back then.

In 2011, Section 487(a)(20) of the HEA went into effect.  Section 487 prohibits colleges from providing incentive compensation to employees or third party entities for their success in securing student enrollments or the awarding of Title IV HEA program funds.  There is a wordy explanation of what that means on the Department of Education’s website, but basically it means that “schools” cant give their recruiters bonuses based on how many “starts” they get, and financial aid advisors cannot get bonuses on how many loans they package.  I believe that the goal of Section 487 was to remove the incentive for recruiters and advisors to commit deceptions.

Prior to 2011, well, I’ll let you decide.

This is a help wanted ad that ran in a large paper in Southern California during the late 1980s.  Do you think these folks were getting bonuses for their starts?

I have tried to find brochures, online, from the time I went to school. There aren’t any, that I could locate at least, and I assure you, I looked. According to ED, I originally had 5 loans during my time at ITT – a couple Perkins Loans, and what not. They have been consolidated over the years, and I currently owe about $60,000.

I have paid over 1/2 that amount towards the loans since leaving ITT.

If I told you the original loan amounts, the first thing you would probably say is, “wow, that doesn’t seem like much!” followed by something like “why didn’t you just pay it all off right when it came due?.. You wouldn’t have all that interest.”

In other words, blame me and not ITT.

Let’s for the sake of an argument, make some assumptions:

1. My ITT tuition was $20,000
2. I used $10,000 in federal grants (Pell grants, etc)
3. I used $10,000 in loans.

$10,000, today, doesn’t seem like a lot of money. I totally understand that. But during the time I went to ITT, gas was 0.90 a gallon. Minimum wage was $3.35 an hour.

So please, do not come at me with how my own financial irresponsibility has somehow landed me where I am. Also, for what it’s worth, my loan is current. I’ve made nearly $30,000 worth of payments, and still owe this amount.

In the 1990s old ITT started leveraging it’s highly successful, but relatively small, for-profit school segment. Who is looking out for the students during this time?