Sign Me UP!
The Miami Herald wrote about Fastrain, a for profit vocational school.
Recruiters for private for profit colleges may have taken recruiting students to the next level. On one hand you can imagine that recruiters would make outrageous promises about jobs, pointing to distinguished alumni in the community that got training related jobs and make some high pressure phone calls to try to close the deal and get the client to sign up so the college can start getting the Pell Grant Money and loan money to the school.
Fasttrain, a discredited private for profit computer training school that received over 35 million dollars in Pell Grant Money and other Federal Moneys between 2009-2012. The owner of the school is under criminal indictment and the feds want their money back. The Feds say the school hired strippers and told them to recruit, recruit, recruit. I don't remember that back in the playbook when I worked for the local job training agency
I remember referring a few folks to Fastrain for job training back in 2003 when I was employed by the South Florida Workforce Development Agency. They were a small player back then but all the for profit schools appreciated getting students from our agency because we paid a great deal of the tuition up front and only held back about 30% as an incentive for training related placements, and paid considerably less for a job that wasn't training related or temporary. My career in the bureaucracy pretty much ended when I got stingy in approving training slots for truck driving schools and schools that sprung up to train folks in the medical field. I got shuffled around and retired early in 2005.
Before that, I made waves by telling laid off pilots from Eastern Airlines and Pan Am that we did not pay for glass cockpit training to allow them to fly other planes. They had a point, retraining in small engine repair wouldn't pay the bills of a pilot who might have been making $75,000 for a legacy airline. I wasn't very politic back then by suggesting that someone making that much money should probably finance that kind of training on their own. The agency had set maximums it would pay for any training to allow the agency to serve more people. Eventually the policy was changed and some pilots did get that training.
Recruiters for private for profit colleges may have taken recruiting students to the next level. On one hand you can imagine that recruiters would make outrageous promises about jobs, pointing to distinguished alumni in the community that got training related jobs and make some high pressure phone calls to try to close the deal and get the client to sign up so the college can start getting the Pell Grant Money and loan money to the school.
Fasttrain, a discredited private for profit computer training school that received over 35 million dollars in Pell Grant Money and other Federal Moneys between 2009-2012. The owner of the school is under criminal indictment and the feds want their money back. The Feds say the school hired strippers and told them to recruit, recruit, recruit. I don't remember that back in the playbook when I worked for the local job training agency
I remember referring a few folks to Fastrain for job training back in 2003 when I was employed by the South Florida Workforce Development Agency. They were a small player back then but all the for profit schools appreciated getting students from our agency because we paid a great deal of the tuition up front and only held back about 30% as an incentive for training related placements, and paid considerably less for a job that wasn't training related or temporary. My career in the bureaucracy pretty much ended when I got stingy in approving training slots for truck driving schools and schools that sprung up to train folks in the medical field. I got shuffled around and retired early in 2005.
Before that, I made waves by telling laid off pilots from Eastern Airlines and Pan Am that we did not pay for glass cockpit training to allow them to fly other planes. They had a point, retraining in small engine repair wouldn't pay the bills of a pilot who might have been making $75,000 for a legacy airline. I wasn't very politic back then by suggesting that someone making that much money should probably finance that kind of training on their own. The agency had set maximums it would pay for any training to allow the agency to serve more people. Eventually the policy was changed and some pilots did get that training.
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