As the country packed for Labor Day Weekend, rumor spread quickly on Friday afternoon that ITT Tech Institute would be shutting down across the country, following a report from Gizmodo.
The Indiana-based higher learning org focused on tech education, which has been around since 1969, replied to reporter Michael Nunez that it didn’t comment on rumors, and pointed to its latest SEC filing for more info.
On Tuesday, though, the for-profit school came clean with a public statement: All 130 campuses in 38 states would be permanently shutting down, leaving 40,015 students in the air. Its 8,000 or so staffers were all laid off.
The culprit, according to ITT Tech? The U.S. Department of Education.
“The actions of and sanctions from the U.S. Department of Education have forced us to cease operations of the ITT Technical Institutes, and we will not be offering our September quarter,” the statement reads. “We reached this decision only after having exhausted the exploration of alternatives, including transfer of the schools to a non-profit or public institution.”
As Gizmodo’s Nunez writes, the story is way, way more complicated than that.
Sanctions from the Department of Education follow a policy geared at cracking down on for-profit colleges that had been taking in federal aid without yielding results (as this report by The Atlantic points out). And this might just be the beginning.
“Although most of the other for-profit colleges have not been barred from accepting students using federal aid, we suspect that they will eventually feel the wrath of the US Department of Education’s ongoing crackdowns,” Nunez writes.
ITT Tech had presence in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Philly. Its main Philadelphia location, housed in the 100 block of South 7th Street, appeared shuttered on Tuesday morning, with empty offices and a missed delivery sign from FedEx stuck to its main door.
We set out to figure out how many staff and students in the Philly area would be affected by the shutdown. Nicole Elam, Vice President of ITT Educational Services, Inc., emailed Technical.ly this terse response:
Please see today’s press release available at http://www.ittesi.com/2016-09-06-ITT-Educational-Services- Inc-to-Cease-Operations-at- all-ITT-Technical-Institutes- Following-Federal-Actions. This will be our only comment.
Students with questions on what to do next might find this blog post from the Departament of Education helpful.
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