CDA Technical Institute

Instructors– There are a couple of decent instructors. The others don’t care at all about their jobs or the education of their students. You would be better off taking the classroom days for diesel engine mechanics and underwater welding and just teaching yourself with textbooks online. Other important classes will be substituted with old episodes of Modern Marvels down on YouTube if the instructor doesn’t feel like teaching, which is understandable. It probably gets pretty hard teaching all day when you’re drinking four lokos out of a Gatorade bottle. Don’t worry though, you can fail the final exam 4 times and still graduate. You don’t even need to show up sober.
Facilities– The deepwater training center at Ocala is an incredible facility and probably exactly what you picture in your head when you imagine dive school. Unfortunately you only spend two weeks there. The rest of the four and a half months is spent in a cramped school under a bridge in a dangerous part of Jacksonville. Hope you have a small class, or else you can look forward to putting three to four people to a cheap folding plastic table. Oh, I almost forgot. Every Friday your dive time/​education is cut short so you can walk around the grounds picking up cigarette butts, picking weeds, sweeping floors and mopping. If you dare to think that’s the job of the maintenance crew your tuition pays for you can look forward to being rolled back to another class in 30 days, or being used as a free form of labor for several hours after the school day digging holes, doing more cleaning, or any other task the administration doesn’t want to pay somebody to do.
Dorms/​barracks– The school says they model the rooms to prepare students for life offshore. That is a pretty genius way to spend the bare minimum on living space for adults spending over $ 30k for a lackluster product. You can look forward to living in a cramped cubicle with 4 other grown men. Prepare yourself for the stench of dozens of filthy feet and tons of unwashed underwear. You can also look forward to having your dive/​classroom time interrupted if one person in your class fails their daily room inspection.
If you want to spend over $ 30k on a school that provides a subpar product, instructors that belittle their students and talk to them like they are children this is the school for you.
If that’s not what you’re looking for, go to DIT in Seattle. I wish I would have.