For-profit tech schools have absolutely crummy placement records.
A lot of community colleges have equally appalling placement records.
Arguing that the first is evil and should be condemned for their records while community colleges get a pass just looks bad. The response so far has been pretty much to rail against the for-profit schools while furiously ignoring the community colleges' records.
But community colleges have another problem: They often have crummy infrastructure and lack "the right" programs. Even if there's demand, the courses can't be created because there's a funding hump to get over, or the programs wouldn't pay for the infrastructure. (Remember this when you hear that it's entirely demand that creates openings, all by its little self.) You need space and very expensive equipment for a lot of specialized courses, as well as the funds to hire instructors that are competent and often in demand elsewhere, and often the course enrollment has to be kept low. (And if it's not, education suffers, and if there are a lot of small classes then the equipment takes a real beating and depreciates very, very quickly.)
The German model works because the students are all but apprentices and the private sector helps determine who gets admitted, what the curiculum is, and who gets hired. Nobody wants that here because while it's a good school-to-job pipeline, control matters. It also requires that the high school kids that enter the pipeline have the prerequisite training, and we're too busy with a one-size-fits-all model because, well, the German model of education promotes a kind of cognitive inequity. You're trained for humanities or technical or vocational skills, so you don't Sartre or pre-cal or mechanical drawing if you're in the "wrong" program.
Of course, the CC's lack of needed offerings makes for a need unmet by the public sector. It's the "space" that the for-profit schools exists in. I've known a fair number of people trained at ITT or other such places and got training that they needed for better jobs, but which the local CC system doesn't offer. Railing against those schools while not having a replacement for the training they could give also seems counterproductive. This helps fill that gap.
The third remaining problem for both community and for-profit colleges is the drop-out rate. You accrue debt--more at for-profit schools, but also a fair amount at community colleges--and then drop out after 2-3 years of a two-year program that you needed remedial work to do good in or which you only attended part time--and you get debt but no certificate of completion. We won't even discuss the racial disparities that this drop-out rate displays. To wrangle with the drop-out rate we have a proposed rating system, sort of like the rating system for annual yearly progress that's served the K-12 education system so well in the last 15 years, complete with standardized tests of some sort to show that what's paid for--a college education--wasn't just delivered by the institution but that the institution "owns" the student's learning.
But one but of reconstructionism at a time.
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