Capitol Hill Roundtable: Darien Pitts Testimony Delivered In Conjunction with the Department of Education Rulemaking on Accountability, 2025

 VETERANS ROUNDTABLE on HIGHER EDUCATION:
WRITTEN STATEMENT OF DARIEN PITTS

Army Veteran; Resident of Pflugerville, TX

 U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Hearing Room
December 8, 2025

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Darien Pitts, and I served in the Army for 20 years before retiring about two years ago. I decided I wanted to go back to school, and I ended up finding the San Francisco Film School. I did my research, and the school offered some specific courses that interested me, such as motion graphics and visual effects. I decided to enroll and started in January of 2024.

Unfortunately, the school raised some red flags from the beginning, and the recruitment process was shady. They really focused on the selling point of the highest housing allowance rate, which was not something I asked about. I told them I thought they were wrong about the numbers too, because they told me my housing would be almost double what it really was.

I was very disappointed to learn that the classes I was interested in were not being taught, and hadn’t been for many years, even though they were in the catalogue and I had asked about these classes before enrolling. They actually didn’t even offer enough classes for me to attend at a full-time rate, and some classes were double scheduled so that I had to miss one to go to another.

And the quality was worse than what was advertised. The school promised state-of-the-art equipment, but we only had access to cheap, low-quality equipment that they didn’t give us for a long time. In the meantime, they told us to just use our phones. The information we learned was also not up to the standards I expected from a college. I could have taught myself what I learned in those classes.

I decided to leave at the end of the year because the school was so bad. I had talked to the Dean about my concerns, but the staff just pushed the issues to the side or put the blame on other staff members. No one took accountability or offered any solutions.

It seemed like at least 90% of the students were veterans. It was heartbreaking to see what was happening to the other veterans who didn’t have as much to fall back on. I don’t want to see this keep happening to my fellow veterans, so I am speaking out to ask you to help make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Statement_Darien Pitts