I went to ITT-Technical Institute when I was 20/21. I am now almost 25 and I have to say that this school ruined my life. Going to this "school" was the biggest mistake I have ever made. What I'm dealing with right now is debt, wage garnishment, taxes taken away and nothing to show for it and no hope for it to get any better. There's a sick, twisted feeling in my stomach all the time. I am constantly crying and panicking from the stress going to this school has caused me.
It's one thing to pay off loans for a school that gave me a good education and a decent job after I graduated, but that was not the case here. I did not pay off my loans. I am now being hunted down by collection agencies that claim I have 5 separate loans totaling $25,000 and I didn't even go for a year, so that doesn't make much sense to me. I can't fight these loans. I'm not even sure how to go about it. I tried contacting BBB but ITT has such good lawyers due to them being sued a lot. I can't even put into words the desperation and agony this is causing me.
I go back and think... What did they do that was illegal? Well, I had instructors telling us to use work from Deviantart.com and then told us we could use it in our own work and call it ours. I remember telling my instructor I didn't want a specific piece hung up in the halls, so he waited until I left school to hang it up. I had to find that out from another student. During my enrollment, I remember overhearing teachers saying they weren't up to OSHA standards. I didn't really know what that meant, but it sounded useful. I was told from other students that ITT was changing the GPA's of students just to get them to pass. One student slacked off and didn't even do his final or anything and he passed. That happens a lot, I guess. They tried to do the same thing to my Fiance. He wasn't passing and he was just done with it all and they wouldn't stop telling him to come back and he'd pass. I guess they get more money that way.
I remember them not letting me just use my Fiance's books (they were exactly the same) and made me use new ones. So now we have all these copies of the same book. I tried reading the papers I signed. I tried understanding what I was doing before I enrolled. I tried thinking of questions to ask. I still got scammed. 20 year old girl just wanting to go to college because "that's what you do when you graduate High School" and expected to understand these forms she's filling out. Expected to understand she just signed the rest of her life to a bunch of parasites. Expected to understand what all those words mean — default, interest, accrue, etc. I just want to go back in time and slap myself.
And $25,000? My Fiance went for twice as long as I did and I owe 4 times as much as he does—same school, same lender, same amount of time out of school, same kind of loans. I'm just trying to wrap my head around that.
How do they get away with this? I need to know that there's something I can do. I need to know that I'm not going to be dealing with this for the rest of my life. Is somebody pursuing something? For goodness sake, not a single person in my class has a job! Not a single person can use their degrees! Even the students who had a well earned 4.0 GPA are working at fast food joints. How are they getting away with this? Even if I graduated, I'd still be in the same boat. I dropped out because the chair of my department started freaking me out when I asked him about my future if I continued with ITT. He started acting really weird, wouldn't look at me, and started talking really fast and talking around my question. I left right after that.
What do I do? I know I wrote a lot. I'm sorry. I am just beside myself.
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