ITT Technical Institute’s permanent shutdown will have deep ripple effects across hundreds of thousands of students who have committed huge amounts of money and time to a promise of a better future. This doesn’t even include the 35,000 students who were slated to begin classes this month,¹ nor the countless prospective students who had their sights set on pursuing an education to open doors to new opportunities.

In the long term, is it a good thing that ITT Tech shut down? Well, yes. Absolutely yes. For years, the company profited off of a disturbing mix of false promises, high-risk student loans, and overall shameful, predatory behavior.

“ITT Tech has a long record of making big promises to students, only to leave them in debt without delivering the kind of quality education they need to succeed.”
—Suzanne Martindale, staff attorney for Consumers Union (Source: LA Times)

“Last year, ITT Tech received an estimated $580 million in federal money (aka taxpayer dollars), according to the Department of Education.

One week after ITT Tech was prohibited from accepting federal aid, the whole company shut down. The swift closure of all of its campuses should indicate exactly how far the company went to recruit students using federal aid.” (Source: Gizmodo)

ITT Tech never provided any “education for the future.” It didn’t provide education for any era. And while it’s a good thing that the company can no longer sell people on that claim, it’s unfortunately not the only technical “school” that has promised to be the bridge between hopeful students and a new, thriving technical career.

ITT Tech’s pattern of predatory behavior and disturbing indifference to students is not an isolated case in the technical education space.

Coding bootcamps, which have exploded into the market as a structured path for skilled workers to fill software jobs, are an amazing concept. Conceptually, the coding bootcamp model should be the solution to a big part of the ITT Tech problem. Coding bootcamps (like Firehose) give you a jump start, teaching you tangible skills and thinking all within a small time frame, allowing you to join and code with a web development team.

But in reality, too many coding bootcamps are using the same shady tactics that ITT employed for so many years. Motivated by the pressure of investors, they target ambitious, self-starting individuals using bogus job placement statistics. They trade crazy price tags for glorified material. It’s become all-too-common, yet it often remains overlooked.

Students deserve better.

How do you give students what they deserve? It’s simple.

You stop trying to convince them to trust you, and instead, you allow them to decide for themselves whether you’re worthy of their trust.

This is why, at Firehose, we let all prospective students try our program for 2 weeks at no cost. We leave it up to them to decide if we’re the right partner for them in their journey to learn how to code and become a software engineer. If we’re not, there’s no pressure to continue. We’re completely bootstrapped, so our allegiance is to our students, not investors.

We know there is a massive problem, and we want to be part of the solution.

Whether you’re a student who was left stranded by ITT Tech, or a student who enrolled in a coding bootcamp that employs the same types of tactics, we want to give you the opportunity to try our program risk-free.

That’s why we’re offering a 100% refund guarantee during your first 2 weeks of the full program. That gives you a total of four weeks to code with us, become a part of our community, get a real feel for the Firehose experience, and most importantly, make the most informed decision about whether we’re the right fit for you, completely risk-free.

Our goal is to help you reach yours. If you want to try us out, you can join our community here.

Happy coding,

Marco Morawec
CEO and Co-founder