In 2018, this newspaper said I was calling for "faster, cheaper IT training."
they had no idea I was calling for a revolution.
Back then, 43,000 ITT Tech students had just discovered their $85,000 degrees were worthless. The school collapsed. The debt remained.
I'd just left $350,000 at Arista Networks because I couldn't unsee the scam:
Fortune 500 CEOs begging for engineers: "We'll pay $150,000 for someone who can configure a network."
College grads with $85,000 in debt: "What's a subnet?"
The gap wasn't an education problem. It was an extraction scheme.
Here's what that newspaper article didn't capture:
I wasn't advocating for "faster, cheaper training."
I was exposing that 4-year degrees are artificially inflated. Like diamonds. Like insulin. Like everything else we're told is "valuable" but is actually just controlled.
The truth nobody wants to admit:
You can master enterprise networking in 4 months.
You can go from zero to six figures in no time.
You can build tomorrow's infrastructure without yesterday's debt.
The education cartel needs you to believe otherwise. Their business model depends on it.
Seven years later, NGT Academy has proven what they said was impossible:
3,000 engineers placed.
Average starting salary: $85,000.
Time to job: 4 months.
Cost: Less than a used Honda Civic.
But here's what matters more than the numbers:
Every graduate who goes from food stamps to six figures proves something profound:
Talent is equally distributed. Opportunity is not.
When you remove the artificial barriers - the 4-year requirement, the $100,000 price tag, the prerequisite maze - genius emerges from everywhere.
That single mom in Detroit. The veteran in Alabama. The 47-year-old factory worker who thought he was too late.
They weren't lacking ability. They were lacking access.
"Faster, cheaper training" wasn't the story.
The story was that millions of brilliant people are locked out of prosperity by a system designed to extract, not educate.
We just built a door where there used to be a wall.
And 3,000 people have already walked through it.