After 4 months of training with New Horizon: Computer learning (NH) in their NSPP program, I am ashamed of how they got over on me and many other students with their deceitful business practices. From them making many false promises to each student, to completely draining many veterans of their benefits ($24,000). New Horizons also found a way to make money off of students using government assistance programs to bank on the government there too. Making money hand over fist and not giving their student in most cases anything more than a high five and thanks for the paycheck in the end.

A quick rundown of the program:

The NSPP program is a 4 month program that's marketed to get students IT certificates in 9 different fields: A+1001, A+1002, Net+, Sec+, cybersecurity, Azure, Azure administration, Microsoft 365, and AWS.

To begin:

1.) New Horizon tells students that they will get them computer certifications in order to pursue an IT careers. What they don't explain is that the coursework is at least a  good 2 years' worth of training and learning. Instead of giving the proper length of training, they condense all of this information in a 4 month period. This not only discourages students from continuing in the course but makes them not even consider going for any certifications. This issue only gets worse because the exams in order to obtain these IT certifications are authorized through COMPTIA and not New Horizon. So you would expect them to give you a voucher after each window of training, but that's a no! Instead, they won't even give you a voucher to take the actual exam with CompTIA unless you make an 80% on THEIR pretest. These pretests range from 90-120 questions and are timed on an already wide range of issues covered in the course. So, not only are you trying to take in all this information in a short period of time, but you're also losing out on being able to test because you have to pass their HUGE pretest, which is hard itself. Lastly, these pretests have hardly any connection to the CompTIA exam, so you're spending all of this time studying trying to pass NH test that doesn't help you on the actual CompTIA exam.

Impact:

With this practice, NH saves a tremendous amount of money not having to pay for hardly any CompTIA exams for any of the students that come through their program. Since most students don't even get out of the first block of testing. The price for CompTIA exams ranges from $220 up. If every exam was the exact same price, which they aren't, that would be $1980 for every student. Once again most students don't make it to the test for 1 exam and this is based on personal experience. 

Round 2:

2.) Next off, the courses are online and played a huge purpose for why so many students signed up from out of the district. The main campus is located in Miami and most of the students in my class were spread out all over Florida mostly with a few residing outside of the state. Students were promised that after the 4-month course that we would receive a 1 year resit period online. Since THEY knew this was way too much information to take in at once. This is where everything gets hairy on this matter, they didn't tell us, students, upon signing up that they are going back to fully on-campus in January! And that there would be no online options to sit in these classes. Which leaves all non-local residents with no options to take advantage of the one-year sit-in that was promised. Now, these students don't have any certifications, but also no way of trying to learn the information over again to at least try to get the certifications.

Round 3:

3.) Third and I'll add more later is the course material, which isn't made by New Horizons at all. They use a website called quizzez.com to test us daily on 20 different questions from different parts of the course. I would like to remind you that their pretest is 80 questions minimum. Then the instructor teaches from these 20 questions while only covering that much material for each night. As the program goes along and some students advance to other coursework, these questions get less detailed answers so the instructor can cover even more topics. You get to a point with the quizzes that you're just remembering the questions and answers because they only have so many options. This makes it improbable and damn near impossible to learn everything you need for the CompTIA exam. Then before you know it they are rushing you into the next certification information which works out to be about every 2.5 to 3 weeks. This is for 9 IT certs in a small amount of time, while only being taught the same questions that won't appear on the actual CompTIA exams. To make matters worse NH tells you to go to workshops to get extra help, but these are usually scheduled in the middle of the day when most people are at work! 12 PM-2 PM...

Lastly:

I've asked on multiple occasions, with multiple members of the organization to see their statistics on student success rates. I was always stonewalled and told that they don't keep those types of metrics around. Yet, you look on their website and they have stats all over the place. I know in my class we had 24 students and only 5 of us were able to get at least one certification. That's a whopping 20% of students getting anything out of this course. That's disgusting and one of the certs we get A+1001 doesn't even fully count unless you get the 2nd part as well. Which requires another pretest and CompTIA exam.  So in all actuality, only 3 students received a cert (15%). 

Some quick math for everyone:

1 Veteran= $24,000

my class had 10 I believe

$24,000 * 10= $240,000 and they don't give anything at the end of their course. 

I don't know how much the government assistance students paid for the program, but I'm willing to bet it's around the same price point. We had more than a few of those students in there as well.

I will be adding more of New Horizons dastardly deeds as this goes along, but I at least wanted to get this started.