The Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology

Date: Jan 23 2010
Major: Aerospace Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
I graduated from Spartan in 2006 from the professional pilot program. I'm currently a first officer at a respectful regional airline. Here's the thing, everyone on this blog has posted all the negatives about Spartan and I too felt some of those feelings while attending. But like anything else you get out of it what you put in. I can tell you that while I was a student at Spartan they had a ridiculous commercial pilot course. They had a lesson planned for every hour needed to obtain your license. The problem with that was you had 23 lessons of nothing but slow flight, stalls and steep turns. And lets say on lesson 5 or 6 you have a bad performance, instead of correcting the problem on the next lesson (since after all it is the exact same lesson) they incomplete it and you pay for extra training. Also every lesson was quoted at exactly 1 hour which we all know isn't going to happen. So in the end you wind up taking your commercial checkride with 300+ hours instead of 250. I was quoted 45 grand for the total cost of my training. I actually spent well over 70 grand and back then that didn't even include a multi-engine rating. I wasn't alone, in fact everyone I knew had spent about the same and at the time Spartan didn't seem to care. I have heard they changed the commercial program quite a bit since I graduated and it now includes a multi-engine rating. As bad as all this may sound just about every pilot at the airline I fly for has a similar story about the flight schools they attended. One woman in my new hire class spent 140 grand at Danny Webster college for basically the same education I received for 75. Her student loan payment is 1200 a month which is more than my mortgage. The majority of the pilots in new hire class spent 100 grand plus and everyone had the same complaints. Lets face it, we are attending a tech school not a university. Tech school's do not have the government funding that universities have so naturally there not going to have all the bells and whistles. I'm not suggesting that you lower your standards just do a little more research on the school before you write them a check. Take a tour of the campus, talk to some of the students. Looking back I probably would have attended a four year state school. But Spartan did deliver, I am an Airline pilot and that is what I attended Spartan for. So overall I rate Spartan a B-. A lot of the comments on this page come from students who just like to complain. Spartan is a descent school if you show up prepared and ready to work.