Ok, here goes...
I have read this thread with great interest as I too shall be blindly handing over a significant sum of cash to a certain integrated school close to a rather famous university very shortly and would like to offer a couple of (hopefully) innocuous remarks.
I'm sure anybody who has researched any time into the various training options available will have stumbled across the employment statistics on the OAT website. Whilst I am not so naive as to suggest that all the employment successes for this year are necessarily all graduates from this year, the fact that there are consistent levels of employment over 3 years seems to suggest a healthy level of employment success. Furthermore, on the OAT forum, it is stated that the number of integrated students trained per year is capped at 220 and that the cadets (thomas cook et al) are not included in the statistics (but are included in the 220 trained). Thus, if we assume that the majority of the employments occur in a reasonable period of time (is that not a fair assumption?) the numbers seem to suggest a somewhat more positive outlook than might have been suggested previously.
Another point that I have often thought about is this. Whilst I agree that the schools themselves will prefer to hide negative statisitics under the carpet why is it that, if so many people are forking out such significant sums of money and ending up in Tescos, they aren't shouting about it? Sure there are the odd people who crop up on this site that have a hunch and haven't got to where they thought they would get to, but why aren't there more?
I'm sure I have been considering this through a pair of very fetching rose-tinted glasses (and do please let me know if they don't suit), and do not get me wrong - I am more than realistic about the pitfalls and risks associated with entering this career - but I do believe that a blanket approach to the entire training industry is a somewhat unhelpful way to assess training risk.
Send on the firing squad....
p.s. when I went to visit the bank manager at the HSBC, he not only had unblemished praise for OAT (don't forget I was already signed up so absolutely no need for the sales pitch) but was adamant that the vast majority of graduates on the HSBC books who where dutifully paying back their loans were in flying jobs. An important point he also raised that I think is imperative was that, in his experience, those who weren't were as a result of their own faults. This really ought not to be overlooked when considering the rather alarming probabilities mentioned elsewhere on this thread!