The sad effects of a closing college.

NBC News reports.

‘Wasted My Time’: Displaced Corinthian College Students Lament School Closure

Students at the Corinthian College network of schools just learned a painful lesson from the real world.

Corinthian had billed their schools as places where busy people could advance their careers. Heald, one of the for-profit higher education company’s colleges even had the motto: “Get in. Get out. Get ahead.”

But the 16,000 students at Corinthian’s 28 campuses found out Sunday that they would “get out” sooner than they had planned.

That’s because Corinthian shut down Heald College, Everest College and WyoTech College, abruptly leaving students across six states with questions about how they would finish their educations and how they would pay off the loans that they had taken out to “get ahead.”

Linda Cervantes, 28, a single mother of two kids aged 3 and 11, was working in retail when a friend recommended Everest College in Industry, California.

The prospect of getting out from behind the cash register was appealing to Cervantes so she spent nine months pursuing Everest’s pharmacy technician program. After that, she was required to complete 200 certification hours through the school before she could get her license. Cervantes had two weeks left.