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?

It’s 2022, after all.  I have a Facebook account.  I have a YouTube channel.  I have an Instagram account.  I have a reddit account.  Hell, I even have TWO tik-tok accounts.  So why would I make a website to put out information like this?

First, I am not interested in showing my face.  Making tik-toks or YouTube videos makes me worry about presentation rather than content, most importantly.  Secondly, this is a text intensive process.  I cant convey a lot of this info, by talking about it.  Instead you need to read it, and make the Department of Education read it.  If you are here reading this now, you have just started, and there is going to be a lot more reading before you are done.

As for the rest of social media, Facebook and Instagram are not suitable places for this content.  MY family doesn’t need to hear all this crap.  YOU do.  And you aren’t on my Facebook friends list.

Second, this feels more anonymous.  I have other domains I could have chosen to put this on, but you would not have had to work hard to find out who I am.  Don’t misunderstand me, I ONLY need to maintain my privacy because I do not want to jeopardize my case.  If my DTR was approved tomorrow, I would share my letter with the world along with a YouTube video of me celebrating my new financial freedom from a debt that was bestowed upon me by ITT.

I am just making sure to protect my interests, while sharing what I have found out.

My “letter” to support my DTR is 8 pages long.  I don’t know if that’s considered long, or not.  For all i know, some folks are sending off 30 page letters.

But no, I had to do this via a website.  I assure you I am a very real person, and there is a story here.  Just keep reading.

I went to ITT when I was 22.

In going through this, just one thing I discovered is the amount of debt that was taken on by folks during the 2000’s.

What I mean by that is that while my debt is older, and because of that, in most cases (unless someone has managed to pay off their loans completely), I have paid more, folks from the 2000s owe more.  It makes sense, the tuitions for more.

It doesn’t make me any less convinced of my own case.  But I have definitely walked away feeling worse for some of the more recent ITT’ers.  On the other hand, their debts are being removed quickly (by government standards).

I guess what I am saying is that some people paid $45,000/year at ITT.  I certainly didn’t pay that much.  And I cannot imagine having that kind of debt at 22.

While I am not a generally a fan of Wikipedia (I come from a generation that had dictionaries and encyclopedias that had paid editors (people that did that job for a living and not for “fun”), it (wikipedia) did come in handy for a couple things:

It’s a good starting point for understanding the old ITT and the new, most often talked about ITT of the 2000’s.  I mentioned this before, if you plan on doing any research for your case that can’t include the same arguments of a particular class that’s already been litigated, get a good understanding of how ITT functioned as a company during the changes that took place.

I went to ITT when the for-profit school business was a very small part of the much larger company.  Because of that, there were and still are important differences and arguments to be made for loan forgiveness.

What am I saying?

I’m saying a lot of things, but basically it comes down to my opinion that when you call your business a school, you get looked at as a school.  When you can hide your “school” business within other business entities, that “school” portion is less apt to be looked at by regulators, and you might get away with more.  That will make more sense later, I don’t want to get a head of myself.

And then there’s just the random stuff that somehow ends up on Wikipedia, that you can search and search for, and the only thing you find is references to it, with no further information.  The stuff that makes it possible for me to say that Wikipedia isn’t reliable.  It’s not really, but for this blog, we don’t care.

We only care that on one of the Wikipedia pages that I, for whatever reason cannot find right now, there is, or was, an obscure reference to lawsuit facing old ITT.  It was so small I barely noticed it.  And it changed everything.

Unless you are living under a rock, if you live in the US, you have heard about student loan forgiveness.  In so far as ITT goes, the majority of that forgiveness is centered around folks that went to ITT during the 2000s, and generally covers two types of folks: 1: those that were left in a lurch when they closed and 2: those that can prove they were defrauded by ITT (again, largely in the 2000s).

If you think you have any kind of loan forgiveness case, you might start where I started at https://predatorystudentlending.org/

There is over 600 pieces of evidence that any ex-student of ITT can go through and read for free.  That is where I started.  Even though I knew I wouldn’t find anything going back that far. That took me down a rabbit hole.

I went to ITT.  Back before it was cool to say that you went to ITT.  I have a DTR that is open, so I am obviously limited in what I can share personally – in other words, I am not going to share my own letter to ED. I will, however, share how I got most of the content of the letter, and a good deal of the research that went into it, in the event the information is helpful to other folks.  I am not sharing everything, I simply cant.

The beginning of the story, is the hard part.  Do I start with the beginning of my story, or with the history of ITT, itself, that is the part that’s pertinent to all of us today?

The Wikipedia page for ITT is kind of confusing, unless you really look.  In the 1980s, ITT was a very large company – that ITT is referred to as old ITT on Wikipedia, and that’s a good way to think about it.   Starting in about 1995, ITT (old ITT) began divesting the for-profit school portion of its business, and by 1999, that divesture seems to have been completed.

Let me say, from the get go, I’m not interested in exact dates as far as some of that stuff goes.  There were changes made that are important to note though:

For instance, the SEC filings for ITT change as the company undergoes changes – that is to say that the for-profit school business that operated under old ITT was a very small portion of a big company, and the SEC filings reflect that.  Conversely, SEC filings for ITT Educational services, reflect the fact that it was a business that pretended to be a school, and that that was it’s only money-making gig.

When I talk about my own case, and why I felt it was necessary to dig a little deeper for proof of my claims, it’s important to understand the structural and corporate changes at ITT.  It isn’t enough to just say something happened, I wanted to prove it.

And sure, at the end of the day, there isn’t any hidden blockbuster event here.  I just want my student loan forgiveness, after all.  You would think it would be easy.

Think again.