ROANOKE (WSLS 10) - Wednesday night, 22 college students that attended the now defunct ITT Technical Institute walked across the stage at Roanoke's Jefferson Center to graduate.
The school told students and staff it would be closing for financial reasons earlier this month.
There's always a concern of your resume looking legitimate when the college you attended no longer exists, but for this graduating class, most of them were nursing students, and staff say almost all of them have already been placed in jobs locally.
Even though students will be receiving their formal diplomas through the mail, the ceremony felt very much like a real graduation with parents and family in attendance.
Nursing School Chair Pamela Lindsey says the State Board of Nursing has already told her these students will receive the same accreditation as any other registered nurses.
She says most of these students are just glad they had already completed the curriculum when the school went under.
"These students that are graduating tonight are just grateful that they were at the end of their program and that we were able to recover the necessary documentation for them to be able to take their boards and things like that," said Lindsey.
Virginia Delegate Sam Rasoul also spoke at the graduation, calling the students resilient and promising that the state will do everything it can to investigate what went wrong at ITT Tech's five Virginia campuses.
There were dozens of other students at the campus in Salem who were not as lucky as this graduating class and are having to go through the process of transferring their credits to another institution.
ITT is still continuing its online classes through next month before closing altogether.