Originally Posted by TonyWilliams

When I attended the ATC academy in Oklahoma City in 1988, they told you to look to each side... one of those guys won't be here at the end of 3 months.

With a 50% washout rate, and it didn't matter if you had a degree, or not, or had military ATC, or not (we had two Air Force ATC guys in my class... one made it, and went to Bay Approach, and the other washed out).

For entertainment, I composed a spreadsheet (ok, this is mega nerdy) of all my classmates, and any identifiable "features" that might provide a trend towards whether we would pass or fail. Important stuff, like smoking or not, beer or wine drinker, etc. No trends could be indentified when the final verdict came out.

Those of us in the top portion of our class (lucky me) had to go to a center. I didn't even really know what a center was. I had a private pilot certificate, and had never talked to a center. I wanted Orange County tower in SoCal. I got Oakland Center (ZOA) in lovely Fremont, after briefly considering ZLA in even less lovely Palmdale.

A few that scored very close to passing were offered Flight Service jobs. Five of us went to Fremont, and even though it had a 40% failure rate, only one failed the 3-4 year checkouts to become journeyman enroute radar controllers. The agency gave the one failure from our group a Flight Data position (mostly putting in international flight plans in the center).

One of my classmates went to ZFW, and I went on to SCT in San Diego, both after about 10 years at ZOA.