While I am not a generally a fan of Wikipedia (I come from a generation that had dictionaries and encyclopedias that had paid editors (people that did that job for a living and not for “fun”), it (wikipedia) did come in handy for a couple things:
It’s a good starting point for understanding the old ITT and the new, most often talked about ITT of the 2000’s. I mentioned this before, if you plan on doing any research for your case that can’t include the same arguments of a particular class that’s already been litigated, get a good understanding of how ITT functioned as a company during the changes that took place.
I went to ITT when the for-profit school business was a very small part of the much larger company. Because of that, there were and still are important differences and arguments to be made for loan forgiveness.
What am I saying?
I’m saying a lot of things, but basically it comes down to my opinion that when you call your business a school, you get looked at as a school. When you can hide your “school” business within other business entities, that “school” portion is less apt to be looked at by regulators, and you might get away with more. That will make more sense later, I don’t want to get a head of myself.
And then there’s just the random stuff that somehow ends up on Wikipedia, that you can search and search for, and the only thing you find is references to it, with no further information. The stuff that makes it possible for me to say that Wikipedia isn’t reliable. It’s not really, but for this blog, we don’t care.
We only care that on one of the Wikipedia pages that I, for whatever reason cannot find right now, there is, or was, an obscure reference to lawsuit facing old ITT. It was so small I barely noticed it. And it changed everything.