Tasha Berkhalter, a former ITT student, shared her first hand experience with these tactics. An army veteran, Berkhalter enrolled at ITT in 2006 hoping to earn a credential that would allow her to work for the FBI.
“I just wanted to give my children a life that I didn’t have and be a productive citizen so I decided to go to school,” she said. She was told by ITT representatives that the GI bill would cover her tuition and that the school would assist with job placement. “They were very convincing, I was very trusting,” she said.
But that turned out not to be the case. Berkhalter wound up taking on about $100,000 in student loans to attend ITT, she said. When she graduated with a bachelor’s of science from ITT, she found out the debt was “all for a degree that no one takes seriously.” Berkhalter said she struggled to repay the debt and has lost homes and cars over the years that she’s coped with it. But thanks to government action over the past year some of her debt has been discharged and she expects the rest to be wiped away soon.
“The cloud has been removed from over my head,” she said. “It’s been a long time coming.”
Read the full story in MarketWatch here.