To BigGrecian :
About the posts, ask the one who wrote them, they were deleted by moderators.
"I think any school where the instructor treats you as a customer is going about training the wrong way"
-> That's exactly what I'm thinking when we're talking about INSTRUCTORS. The LESSONS should be totally airline orientated, so that the students know how it is to work.
Now, when it comes to the management team or student support, that's a different story in my opinion. I don't know if you've been to PTC, but I can assure you if you paid 100K€ for what you get in terms of service, you'd be REALLY annoyed, to say it politely. I think we have the same opinion, but just that mine was misunderstood in my previous post ;-)
"That doesnt' make them any less of a professional and are probably far more skilled and qualified at their job than taking someone who has flown jets previously."
-> True. They may be good at teaching you how to fly a Seminole. But is that what you're there for ? If they haven't been involved in real ops, how can they know where they're sending you ? And hence, how can they TEACH you how to do it ? They send you to the commercial world without a CLUE of what it's like. Personally, if I just wanted to learn how to fly a light twin in IFR, I could have gone to the airclub just 10 miles from my house instead of crossing the Atlantic for that, it would have cost me half the price. What I expected (and what I was told by the staff when I enrolled) was to find EXPERIENCED instructors. The ones who will teach you far beyond manipulating blue levers or red levers. They will teach you the things that will make a big difference when you get to an interview, the ones who will tell you from the very first hour of flight "do it this way because that's how you're gonna do it in your career". I've flown with that type of guy, and swear, you feel the difference, from the pre flight briefing to the post flight debrief.
Again I don't know how well you know PTC, but apart from ONE guy, all my instructors were graduates from PTC/FIT. Some who don't even care about you ("I don't like my job, I'm just doing it because I need to build hours to get on a jet").