The Ontario ombudsman reports that apprenticeship programs in that province have a low completion rate.

read more.

Is it a better guarantee of success if people go to trade school?

A trade school in Chicago (not represented on Trade School World) is being investigated for misleading students “about job placement and hands-on experience.”

the story is here.

Macleans magazine is carrying a story of a career college that has closed under mysterious circumstances. Read more.

This is a story we have been following with some interest:

In part to help protect against more sham/scam trade schools and to investigate whether scammed trade school students can get some financial recompense, a US senator wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Silver State Helicopters’ business practices.

Senator Bill Nelson,  a member of the Senate’s Commerce Committee, said, “These students were trying to get ahead in life by attending a trade school. Instead, they [only] ended up with huge debt.”

“I have heard from many former Silver State students who say they were steered toward specific private student loan lenders, who, in conjunction with the school, may have engaged in deceptive and unfair marketing practices,” wrote Nelson, in a letter to FTC Chairman William E. Kovacic.

Read more here.

Excellent article from Higher Ed Watch concerning the dangers of attending an unaccredited trade school. It discusses the fallout from the collapse of Silver State Helicopters in Nevada.

Read about trade school shams to beware of.

After less than two years in business, a Provo, Utah aviation training school has grounded to a halt. Silver State Helicopters was a private organization operating flight academies at over 30 locations. Yesterday, it filed a petition for Chapter 7 bankruptcy with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. They closed doors this past Sunday.

You can find students complaining about lost tuition in some online forums. An estimated 100 student pilots are left in the lurch. “The decision to shut down operations was made only after the company explored its other available alternatives,” said a spokesperson for the company, Elizabeth Trosper.

The school was registered as a technical trade school on July 17, 2006.

CDI College in Canada announced that it has changed names to Everest College of Business, Technology and Health Care. CDI/ Everest is part of Corinthian Colleges which has suffered some controversy as noted elsewhere in this blog. And in fact, if you Google CDI College, page one of results turns up several blogs and a forum that rails against CDI as a “rip off,” etc. (This might make one wonder if this might be part of the reason for the name change.)

According to one of the forum’s participants, CDI originally stood for Control Data Institute and was a strong school for tech-related education. Later, it changed the meaning of the acronym to Career Development Institute, presumably so that it could offer broader education. The poster warns, the school is “just a shadow of it’s [sic] former self” and he recommends not taking any courses there.

We at the Trade UP! readily quote all this opinion. But we also wonder, what education institution in the world can promise its grads that they will get jobs or that they will make x amount of money per year? Understand that in no way are we endorsing deception or anything of the like, as is alleged against some Corinthian Colleges. And we also want to remind readers that while CDI/Everest/Corinthian College do advertise here, that does not mean that we endorse that school or any other schools advertised on this site.

But we can also tell you that we have many friends who went to university and ended up flipping burgers. And they don’t seem to complain about getting “ripped off.” And they were usually in a lot more debt than the average CDI graduate ever was. Lots of CDI grads have ended up with very good jobs as have many university grads. Others haven’t fared so well, coming from either school.

It’s an old cliché but there are no guarantees in life.

Corinthian Colleges is the largest chain of trade and career schools in North America. It is publicly traded (NASDAQ: COCO) with happy shareholders still beaming about the last quarterly report announcing the company has increased profits again, this time with a net income of $1.95 million ($0.02 per share) compared to $1.40 million for the same quarter (Q1) last year.

Not everyone is happy with Corinthian Colleges, though. The chain has been the target of several lawsuits related to the fact that its graduates do not find the good jobs promised and so end up in default on student loan payments.

A little over a month ago (October 16^th and 17^th), three Florida campuses owned by Corinthian were raided by federal investigators on behalf of the U.S. Education Department as part of an “ongoing investigation.” Campuses of the National School of Technology in Fort Lauderdale and Florida Career College‘s campuses in Lauderdale Lakes and Pembroke Pines were the subject of the raids. Corinthian denied any wrongdoing or knowledge of the basis for the investigation and investigators declined comment citing the ongoing investigation. Many people are watching Corinthian, though, including us. We’ll admit that some of the schools operated by Corinthian are advertised on this site; they include CDI, Everest and Wyotech. We’re not sure what, if anything, to do about that just yet.

In July of 2007, Corinthian agreed to a $6.5 million settlement in a lawsuit filed by California‘s attorney general. The suit claimed that Corinthian’s subsidiaries overstated the number of graduates who found jobs and how much they were making in income. Corinthian operates over 120 schools across North America. Keep an eye on and out for Corinthian.

One particularly vociferous blog on Corinthian can be found here http://voptsslf.blogspot.com/2007/11/school-by-any-other-name-nec-nit.html. We do not necessarily support the opinions or the practices of any third party sites linked to from this site.