@wolvenworks
Whew lad, sorry I'm gonna rant for a second.
It was all a big scam tbh. Apple gave my school a kickback to force it's students to buy it's products. Like I shit you not, if I declined to "rent" a Univeristy iPad (Of which apple gave the college a set for free or little cost, and the rental was so high they paid off the full price of the iPad within 1 single year of renting them) I had to sign a LEGAL DOCUMENT stating I would purchase my own. It also had to be the brand new iPad at the time, which was like 600 bucks. No older model would suffice. If you didn't provide proof of purchase, you could get dropped from your courses without refund.
My major (education) and the computer science majors were hit with the "program". For us education majors, they claimed the reasoning was because most schools are going 1-1 (meaning every student is being issued a private computer type device by the school district) and we'd need to know how to utilize it in our lessons. That much was true, but the kicker? Not a single school district within the college's radius was using ipads (sans 1 elementary school lol, and we were all secondary education majors). They all had chromebooks, or other windows laptops. I was pissed bc for one I hate apple bc they're a greedy ass company, and 2 I was saving for a new computer that could do everything the stupid iPad could do and more. They stated we'd also absolutely need the ipad to conduct our own college courses with. I made a point to see just how far I could get without ever bringing the thing to class. With an emulator installed, I never did. They could not throw a single assignment at me that I absolutely had to use the ipad for. My computer worked just fine. I literally mounted the ipad on my dorm wall with some command hooks and used it as a $600 digital clock for lulz. (Now it's just mounted in my craft room to be a youtube/manga machine)
The computer science majors though were even more pissed and rightfully so, because they all complained that there was zero evidence to suggest that anything other than windows was being used in their field. Like, all the graduates that came out after all this mess bitched that no employer was impressed by their macbooks and wished they had more windows experience. And they got saddled with a 2500 macbook. Guess the ed majors could count themselves lucky, I literally saw gofund me pages up for the computer science majors begging for help in paying for these beasts. Some said they were forced to drop out of their major because they couldn't afford it. All the school had to say was "we have rentals!" which you could rent from the school for a thousand a semester. 😒
Anyway, basically fuck apple, fuck my old college, and fuck me for ending up dropping out of the education major after I already bought the thing. I at least bailed before I spent a single penny on the certification tests though, of which there were 8 and each cost 3-500 a piece to take (and everyone failed/retook at least 1-2 of them).
Moral of the story, don't be a teacher in Missouri in particular. Their education system is an absolute clusterfuck full of impossible standards and expectations without the actual pay to make it worth it. They really prey upon the people who do it out of passion there.
