Central Refrigerated Service vs. Community College

This is the truth.... look around Most CC courses are much cheaper than 3 weeks of spoon fed company school.
i went to one years ago and 2 of the istructors said "there is stuff i want to tell you but i can't" instead we were spoon fed cdl test and i drove about 150 miles before i went to swift and got used as a log book by a sarcastic baboon.... aw the good ole days

 

Meanwhile, you are on the hook for the cost of the schooling with the community college until you pay them back no matter what. Not to mention that you need at least one year of experience minimum to get a decent driving job. Do the training with Central or some other similar company that offers the same comparable program, do the one year of internship to fulfill your obligation with the company that ends up training you, and at the end of that one year you can then find a better job and not owe anyone anything. If you go to the community college, on the other hand, you will still be paying them back for the the cost of the schooling after one year. Moreover, if you quit before a year and decide trucking is not for you, you will still have to repay the cost of the schooling no matter what. It's a no brainer for me which one is the better deal.

 

The purpose of any school, whether it's a Community College or a Company Truck Driving Academy, is to get you to the point where you can pass a CDL test to acquire your CDL. You don't really learn how to be a driver until you are actually driving and sitting in the drivers seat for 11 hours a day, busting your ### planning your trips, driving those trips, backing into docks, dropping and hooking, handling OSD, filling out your trip sheets, etc., etc., etc. In other words, you learn this job by actually doing it. It's called on the job training and I'm sorry but you don't do enough in a Community College or a Company Truck Driving Academy to learn the job. That's why most companies that hire newbies have training departments and internships. The CDL only gets your foot in the door. The rest is up to you.

 

Really? Either way unless you are a ######, you will end up with a CDL at the end of the day. Does a CDL automatically mean that you are now a professional driver? Hardly! A CDL just gets your foot in the door of a training company, where you will receive on the job training and an internship until you eventually sink or swim and become a professional driver or a has been.

Most companies that hire newbies straight out of community college with brand new CDLs are the very same companies that also have their own Truck Driving Academies. Go figure....

Really? Let's see...the outcome of both ways is a CDL and hopefully your foot in the door of a training company. Now exactly how does the benefits outweigh the cost?

 

Let me help you out dude...anyone who acquires a CDL, whether as a result of attending a community college or via a training company that also has a Truck Driving Academy, will still have to undergo a period of on the job training with a hands on trainer and at least a one year internship with a training company before they will be eligible to find a better driving job. No company worth a #### will hire you with fewer qualifications and pay you worth a #### otherwise. Hence, either way you will end up working for a training company.

 

Many of the better companies will consider a CC student, but not a cdl mill grad. Simply put a person who went to a CC for a few months has much better training.... very much better.


i work for one of those companies, they pick cream of the crop and train them with a driver with more than a few miles under the belt, and train them right.....

 

Anyone with only a CDL, whether it's from a community college or from what you term a CDL mill, which is a matter of opinion, has just the bare minimum necessary and isn't qualified for anything other than to get hired on by a training company in order to go out with a trainer and hopefully one day through hard work become a professional truck driver. It doesn't matter whatsoever how you get your CDL, as long as you get it.

Moreover, I would be willing to bet money that there is no correlation whatsoever between the success rates of a person who attended a community college vs. what you term a CDL mill, as learning to drive a truck professionally to a very great extent depends on the individual drivers and his or her own motivations. It's called intestinal fortitude and some people have it and other people don't. Indeed, some people are able to overcome bad training and some people are horrible nonetheless with the best training.

Nevertheless, I will concede that not many companies but one company in particular does seek to hire better qualified candidates from what they deem are better schools, but I consider that latter decision to be out of ignorance rather than any hard data. Nonetheless, I've read that they have lowered their minimum hiring standards with regards to schooling just recently though.

Yeah right...they are more professional than everybody else maybe in your own mind. Nevertheless, if you work for the company I think you do, then I would say that their better success rate has to do more with better employment screening and much better compensation. Indeed, provide anyone with better training and back that up with much better compensation and I dare say you will end up with much better motivated drivers. It's common sense.

Nevertheless, I don't put any stock whatsoever in the notion that the better success rate is due to a community college CDL vs. a so-called CDL mill CDL, because a person with just a CDL and no training is more or less worthless in this business until after he or she has been trained. The biggest reason for a higher success rate would obviously be therefore due to the much better employment screening, better training, and better compensation. Whereas most training companies, in comparison, will take just about everyone and anyone that applies and that they can get qualified because to them its a numbers game because the more they can get in a truck and trained, the more government money that enters their coffers. Indeed, in other words, it a valuable source of revenue for those companies even though it skyrockets their turnover rates and impugns their reputations, but at the same time that's a hit they are willing to take in return for the much higher earnings.

Personally, I wish the government would stop meddling in the truck driving business altogether and let the free market thrive. Then you would see wages begin to rise again and trucking companies would then be able to attract much higher quality candidates. There isn't a driver shortage in this country. The government falsely claims there is a driver shortage to justify all the money it spends on training new drivers. However, wages in this industry have been stagnant for an awfully long time due exactly to government meddling. Of course, you have greedy companies out there with their grubby hands out as well.

 

I was looking at both central and my local community college and finally settled on central because of the guaranteed job offer once getting my CDL.

Its actually going to cost me more for school as my local community college gets you signed up for a grant and the cost to you is only $150. Why did I choose central? Because it was the best option for me.

Do what js best for you regardless. If your interested in central check out the "follow me through central refrigerated training." Several of us have added our journeys through the school in that thread.

Best of luck to you.

unloader

 

Id go to a cc or a private school. Then find a company that has tuition reimbursement. Apply for grants. The school can help you out with that.

 

Does acquiring a CDL mean that you are now somehow a professional driver? Of course, it doesn't. It only means that you will have only the bare minimum requirements necessary to get hired on by a training company that will put you through their training program and internship to become a professional driver. That's all it means. Do you think that the state CDL testers give a crap where you went to school? Hell no, they don't! They could care less!

Thus you guys that advocate spending a billion dollars to get a stupid CDL from a community college have at it, but becoming a professional driver is much, much more than getting the bare minimum CDL, as it requires on the job training and experience via internships that no school can provide. A driver learns this job via experience; that is by driving everyday and performing the day-to-day responsibilities of a truck driver. At the end of one year, the vast overwhelming majority of rookies in this business will have failed at it miserably and only a tiny few will eventually make it.