The outcome was certain the moment federal and state regulators spilled blood in the water and swarmed ITT Technical Institutes, but today it became official: ITT is going out of business. No proven guilt, just accused to death. But we’ve been over all that.

What is worth pointing out now are the alternatives to ITT. I’ve recently seen a couple of stories from Ohio about community colleges offering to take in students stranded by ITT’s demise, and thought it might be worth doing a little comparison between Ohio ITT branches—I mean, former branches—and these would-be rescuers.

Here is some broad info from the federal College Scorecard on Ohio ITT branches, and it is certainly not great: Annual after-aid costs ranging from $21,212 to $24,258, graduation rates from “not available” to 52 percent, and salary after attending of $38,400, which appears to be listed for most ITT campuses nationwide.

How about those community colleges?

I couldn’t find Butler Tech or Great Oaks on the Scorecard, but Cuyahoga Community College has an annual after-aid student cost of $5,832—enabled by upfront taxpayer subsidies—but only a 6 percent graduation rate and an annual salary after attending of $27,600. Cincinnati State Technical and Community College has an annual cost of $7,021, a graduation rate of 22 percent, and a salary of $29,700. The community colleges are cheaper than ITT, but their outcomes appear appreciably worse.

The Scorecard, importantly, is a seriously flawed tool, but it comes from the very federal government that has targeted ITT, and it gives the kind of first-blush data that have readily been employed to attack the for-profit sector. What I looked at is also, of course, anecdotal. But what it suggests is that the alternatives to ITT, at least in Ohio, are probably no better than ITT was, and may well be worse. Which supports what you’ve read here many times, and which broader evidence upholds: For-profit colleges are not distinctly terrible. It is the whole, federally distorted system that is a wreck.