Complaint Review: IADT Orlando - Orlando Florida

My background: I am a FULL stack web designer and web developer who has put together an ENTIRE web platform (blogs, forums, private messaging, search engine, statistics, control panel, etc) from SCRATCH entirely by myself over the years and ENTIRELY by learning in my own time. If that doesn't make me qualified to post this then nothing does.

I attended IADT Orlando in the early 2000s perusing an associates degree in Web Design (client side languages) and a bachelors degree in Web Development (server side languages).

Half way through the associates degree they dropped BOTH programs and then had me attend no technical classes that were in ANY conceivable fashion applicable except the most fundamentally basic HTML class. All the technical classes they had me attend besides the HTML class was for graphic design which is a completely different field (e.g. signs for billboards, cars, logos, labels for food, road signs; NOT web related).

I took the last class for the associates degree and had added several different designs to my own website with the ability to switch between any number of designs and was failed intentionally. I waited until a different, competent teacher was to teach a semester and until I just walked away it was the same teacher.

I began taking classes for the web development class and the absolute closest thing to web development was a Flash class. Do your research: Flash is dead, was outright rejected by Steve Jobs, search engines (Google) can not read Flash objects and Flash has been in a steady decline across all actively maintained websites.

I attempted to talk with the guy assigned to answer my questions and got an ambiguous response at best. I talked with another head (not sure the title from over ten years ago) and was blown off and late to see my cat who died before I arrived and after talking with the president in his office at the front who commented on how professional I looked I received absolutely no help.

They had replaced my web design and web development degrees with game design. 5% of a video game is graphics TOPS; everything else is code because graphics don't do anything on their own. Did they teach programming? No, there were guys sitting around playing video games and all they did was teach graphic classes. Almost any one can do graphics, CODE is what makes something functional.

I eventually just stopped going and returned home. I had attempted to gain support from the loan companies since I was surely not the only one being ripped off. You'd figure Sallie Mae and others would be concerned about not getting paid back loans if a "college" was not producing results; I wouldn't invest my money in someone attending a "college" that gave their students no help! In fact the job placement rate is considered fulfilled once you left if you were working at 7-11 and I'm NOT talking about sitting in a corporate environment, I'm talking about charging people for slurpees at the cash register making probably $8 an hour.

I have after years of learning, teaching myself and building my web platform have finally begun to find success purely through my own perseverance though not without the loss of the best decade of my life burned through what is easily the worst mistake I have ever made. It was ignorance to walk in those doors and presume that they intended to help me in any way. The only department that would talk with me in any fashion was the fiance department for obvious reasons. I only have one friend I keep in touch with after all these years from that "college" because after all, almost everyone there was just another face in the crowd to be taken advantage of.