At a point in my life when I was extremely unhappy with my profession, I decided to embark on a lifelong dream. So begins the story of myself and so many others, I'm afraid at The Ohio Center for Broadcasting.
I was skeptical about even attending my initial interview having been to several like it for other "Trade Schools" that offer job placement. To me they always felt the same; like I was being hassled by a Kirby Vacuum Salesman. This however was different, I was talking to someone who seemed to share my passion for entertaining. This was someone who understood how I felt. This is the same woman who told me that OCB boasts a 93% job placement guarantee, and that the average salary for those placed was between 26 and 43 thousand a year.
Though the top and bottom of those figures were a paycut, I figured it would only be temporary and within a few months I could begin climbing my way back up to what I needed to live. I must also say that I am not a kid. I said goodbye to my early twenties some time ago, so I needed to make a certain amount if I were going to pursue this field. After hearing from a professional in the broadcast industry that I could make decent money right away, I signed on.
That was the first of many falsehoods that I encountered at OCB.
Now, to be fair, I must say that the school is run by a stand up gentleman named Bruce Ryan who does everything he can to make sure the students get what they need. There are members of the faculty that are professionals in the field and know what they are doing. However, it's an unfortunate reality that the bad outweigh the good. Most of our "Instructors" were merely study hall monitors that were grossly underpaid and didn't care what happened. It was also very clear to me early on that the school had absolutely no prerequisite conditions, nor did it seem to disallow anyone from attending. There were members of my class, I am sad to say, that could barely read. While that is truly unfortunate for those individuals, their lack of proficiency was more than a distraction, it slowed the progress of this so-called fast paced, intense training regimen.
On top of the problems with the staff was the condition of the building itself. The carpet must be original as it is torn, tattered and stained beyond repair. That doesn't mean no one tried to fix it. Long strips of duct tape can be seen holding this old rug together all over the building. The walls are painted in flat eggshell white which can be marked if you hit it wrong with your elbow and it doesn't clean well, period. The knicks and marks and scratches on All of the walls are bad enough, and that 's not to mention the holes and other such damage 18 years of use have given them. I'm also fairly certain that the bathroom on the Radio Station side of the building has never been cleaned out side of the sink and toilet being occasionally wiped. One look at the vent fan in that room speaks painful volumes. For better than a couple weeks we were not allowed to flush the urinal in the men's room on the classroom/administration side because of a plumbing problem. Did the school call a plumber? No, they just put a bucket under the urinal and a sign above it asking you not to flush, and called it good. On top of all that, the dust in the the control room is problematic for several reasons. First, its unsightly and gross, but secondly; it harms the equipment that we are supposed to be using to learn.
That brings me to the HUGE problem. The equipment in this school is antiquated to say the very least. First of all, this is a radio school. Television takes a backseat, which you find right away. What they also don't tell you is that unless you have a four year undergraduate degree, you'll NEVER land an on air gig on any TV news station in the country. The radio studios are decent enough and equipped with mixer boards and Cool Edit Pro. Cool Edit is an outdated system, but a great system to learn on as it has all the properties you'll need to master Adobe Audition. The television studio is painfully outdated and not in working condition. Constant equipment failures in the communication devices between the control room and the studio make airing even a fake news cast a joke. And as if that weren't bad enough, one of the cameras in the studio was malfunctioning during our intro to TV class (which is your second class) and by the time we had to put on our 30 minute newscast (your second to last class 8 months later) it was still not fixed.
Here's the problem I have. Nevermind the placement procedures. I learned a long time ago that only you are going to get you a job. I never really expected someone to find me a job, I just figured that with hard work, I'd get my own. I still have hope that I will someday, but until then I have to go back to my previous profession. What ensures the belief that this school is a scam is that an average of 20 students make up each class. Three classes per start date and three start dates in a given year equal 2.7 million dollars a year. That's assuming the tuition is still 15,000 a head. 2.7 million dollars a year and you can't call a plumber much less carry the "State of the Art" equipment of which you speak? It is the right of any student attending a institution of higher learning to be shown a run down of exactly, to the penny, how their tuition money is being spent. I challenge The Ohio Center for Broadcasting to produce such a document.
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