Briggs: ITT Tech loans forgiven, finally, but it’s only ‘partial justice’

Derek Doty has a degree from ITT Technical Institute. A lot of good it did him. He could have drawn a diploma in crayon and hung it on his wall and it would have prepared him for jobs just as well without wasting two years of his life or putting him $15,000 in debt.

Doty, 39, of Plainfield works as a floor monitor in wastewater management, a job that’s nowhere in the ballpark of what he set out to do at ITT Tech. Yet, he’s one of the lucky ones. At least he has a career.

“When I was going to places for interviews, it kind of got shunned, like, ‘Oh, you went to ITT Tech?’” Doty told me. “After that, I just quit trying to get myself into the IT field. I was already making about the same money as a starting job working in the IT field.”

I called Doty to get his reaction to news that the U.S. Department of Education is forgiving $4 billion in federal loans for every borrower, more than 208,000 of them, who attended ITT Tech between 2005 and 2016 when the company went into bankruptcy and closed. That includes Doty, or at least it should. He wasn’t very excited, though. After six years of false hope, Doty is waiting to see a zero balance on his account — and, even then, loan forgiveness won’t repair the damage done by ITT Tech.

“It definitely has changed my perception of corporations and schools being honest,” he said.

Honest? ITT Tech ranks among the most unscrupulous, predatory institutions ever breathed into existence. The former Carmel-based company swarmed nontraditional college applicants, especially military veterans, and leeched federal student loans and GI Bill benefits, treating so-called “students” as nothing more than hosts to be drained.

There were, and are, other similarly shady for-profit colleges, including the defunct Corinthian Colleges, but ITT Tech was perhaps the worst of the worst. It enrolled students without regard for their skills or prior academic performance, dangling a prestigious career path and pressuring them to sign documents they didn’t understand. Once students got in the door, ITT Tech staff stayed glued to them like cult leaders, keeping them in class until they either graduated at the highest possible level or ran out of loans, whichever came first.

As long as students showed up, and sometimes even if they didn’t, ITT Tech graded them as if they were star quarterbacks in major college football programs while teaching a curriculum that had all the academic value of flat-Earth theory. Actually, less. At least flat-Earthers can make money by posting crazy videos on YouTube. That’s closer to a career in technology than most ITT Tech students can claim.

“I took a computer programming class,” Doty said. “Immediately, the guy’s like, ‘Well, you’re never going to use this kind of program. This stuff is so obsolete. In fact, whatever you do in our courses is obsolete now. You’ll have to retrain yourself.’”

Just what every person wants to hear while spending tens of thousands of dollars on education.

Doty is “not really good with computers,” he acknowledged, which ordinarily might disqualify someone from acceptance into a computer programming course, or at least necessitate rigorous study. Instead, Doty recalled, he excelled without learning much. Once, he said, an instructor completed a programming quiz for him because the person didn’t want to wait for him to finish.

That sounds about right to David Rosensaft, who spent nine months as a dean for one of ITT Tech’s largest campuses in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from 2014 to 2015. Rosensaft described the curriculum as “old and irrelevant” and said he was not allowed to update it. He recalls pleading with instructors to add practical lessons to the course material, while working on the side to hold workshops that included tips for students on how to apply for jobs and dress during interviews — the kinds of life skills that should be covered in high school.

I first talked to Rosensaft when I was reporting on ITT Tech’s downfall in 2017. He wouldn’t let me use his name at the time, mostly because he wanted to bury his association with the company, but he changed his mind now.

“I’ve tried to expunge this from my record, but what the hell, I mean, nobody remembers anything,” he said.

Well, except for those worthless pieces of paper that ITT Tech handed out in his name. Those still sting.

“If I ever win the lottery, I’ll go on eBay and attempt to buy back every single damn diploma that has my signature on it, because it’s embarrassing to have my signature on essentially phony diplomas, hundreds of them,” he said. “It’s a disgrace.”

Every diploma is a symbol of the irreparable harm caused by ITT Tech. Rosensaft participated in the sham, at least for a time. He described the job of an ITT Tech dean as “having to deal with these unfortunate souls and do whatever I could, which wasn’t very much, to try to help them under conditions of extremely limited latitude.”

ITT Tech preyed on people who lacked direction and made sure they couldn’t find their way out, he said.

“It was just outrageous the length at which the recruiting department went to meet their quotas,” Rosensaft said. “They would essentially put a net across the highway and bring in anyone that met essential requirements: They had a pulse, they could sign the indenture, that was all that was required to join ITT Tech. There was no requirement of literacy, no requirement of ability, no requirement of motivation. What only mattered was collecting the federal student loan money, which flowed freely.”

At least, that is, until the Obama administration moved to shut down ITT Tech and other for-profit colleges’ lifeblood of federal-backed loans. That part was good. But the Obama administration, perhaps not envisioning Donald Trump as a successor, failed to follow through on debt relief for the students whose lives have been ruined by the for-profit schools they were shutting down. That failure to finish the job left ITT Tech victims twisting in the wind with tens of thousands of dollars in debt per person and mostly useless credits.

Now, the Biden administration has righted the wrong through blanket loan forgiveness. It is, quite literally, the least the government can do to help victims of a fraud that it perpetuated through lax oversight over where federal student loans and military education benefits were going.

“It’s partial justice. You can’t give them their lives back. You can’t give them their dreams back,” Rosensaft said. “So, maybe they’re not in the same financial condition. But have you restored them? Have you given them back the opportunity to better themselves? No, all you’ve done is you’ve taken away the problem of making things worse for them. All these years have gone by and they’ve either stagnated or given up or not had an opportunity to do any better with this looming over their heads. So, it’s part of the solution, but it’s not by any means a good outcome.”

Having lost so much to ITT Tech, many former students are looking skeptically at loan forgiveness, as if it’s yet one more thing that’s too good to be true.

“I don’t believe (expletive) until it happens,” Harry Bennett, 37, of Baltimore told me.

Bennett attended ITT Tech, that “bunch of crack-smoking swindlers,” as he puts it, from 2009 to 2013. He has between $20,000 and $30,000 in student loans and has heard promises of relief too often in the past six years to trust anything he hears.

Bennett has found a career in cyber security, but emphasized to me he had to pursue training and certifications beyond ITT Tech to get where he is.

“I got that on my own merit, not through ITT Tech,” he said. “I’ve got Charmin toilet paper worth more than that degree.”

These stories were notorious even before the final months when the federal government forced ITT Tech out of business in 2016. Rosensaft, the former dean, said even he was duped into believing he could move to Louisiana and help disadvantaged students there. He said he bought into the same message as the students, albeit with much lower personal costs.

“That was the one thing they did really well. They had effective communications,” Rosensaft said. “They were the cigarette companies of education.”

Now, finally, the federal government is sending loans where ITT Tech’s students long ago sent their diplomas: up in smoke.

Contact IndyStar metro columnist James Briggs at 317-444-6307. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesEBriggs.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: ITT Tech student loans forgiven after years of false hope