Thread regarding ITT Educational Services Inc. layoffs

@Ic5LFUR-2mkq and any other teachers, please email me. I have no doubt that you tried to do your best.

"My evaluations are high and when the students heard I was leaving, they were and still are very upset"

...did you ask for a raise??...now is the time!! Only you can keep the program going

I am full time nursing faculty, well for the next 2 weeks, anyway. I am so upset that I told myself I would be quitting whether I had another job lined up or not. The written course materials are a nightmare, The tests, like the curricula, are designed without faculty input and are taken on line where corporate can watch (lest you dare to throw out a bad question). I made suggestions to alter the test questions in advance of the tests, so that they would reflect course content or HESI content. This also requires corporate approval, and when I tried I got nowhere. The email letter I got back from Mariah at corporate, dripped disdain. She didn't like it that I asked her a question directly and stated that she wanted only correspondence from the chair. Another weird thing--we are not supposed to talk to Elsevier about testing. You should have seen the faces of other faculty and my chair when I told them that I had called Elsevier to determine from which textbooks the online tests are derived. Suddenly I was the turd in the swimming pool. Everyone acted horrified that I had called the service rep at Elsevier. They didn't even hear my evidence that the test questions were not taken from the textbook. I did my best to teach the students, I really did. My evaluations are high and when the students heard I was leaving, they were and still are very upset.

The only teacher I had at ITT worth a sh-- didn't use the books at all. He taught subnetting and it was the only thing that I retained for $100,000 worth of debt. Of course thanks to that debt, and because of going to ITT employers won't touch me with a 20 foot pole so I'm unemployed but the message still rings true.

The sections on academic freedom are certainly in the January 2016 version and I think that they were there before that.

Of course ITT Tech simply ignored many of the ACICS requirements and knew that ACICS wouldn't check in any meaningful way. In any case, with a largely adjunct faculty they could simply get rid of anybody who complained!

Congratulations, @Ic5LFUR! What position did you have? I quit last quarter, after several years as adjunct -- no regrets!

I do have the January 2016 ACICS criteria pdf, and compared the "academic freedom" parts. They seem the same.

I agree totally with your assembly-line assessment. Well said! Did you find that even trying to tweak the friggin' machinery raised eyebrows? I was constantly apprehensive that supervisors were going to get wind of my independent thinking and no longer require my services. But the more I exercised academic freedom, the better teacher I became. My student evaluations were great.

The mind control going on at that company was totally creepy. Eventually, it really got to me. Tossing a wrench in that assembly line seems a worthy goal.

My opinion is that ITT-Tech is trying to save costs with the assembly-line approach. ITT-Tech management can't accept that dropping enrollment is result. So they keep trying to marginalize faculty more and more, pushing the online format within the classroom, blending the resources or whatever. They call it something catchy, but since management have no clue about education, and don't know how to put together online curriculum or instruction, their approach is really backfiring.