>I hope they learned something not to give business critical work to college students.

I've had the same kind of experience hiring a 'real' consulting firms. We were sent a PhD, who banged out a pretty standard looking interface for us that worked terribly. Ostensibly we could've sued, but that just takes more time, and doesn't really fix things.

Wow. Just because someone is a college student doesn't mean they are incompetent! Plenty of people do business critical work as college students, haven't you ever heard of co-op before? A degree doesn't make you competent either, I've worked with enough people who have degrees who are completely incompetent. College students might need some extra supervision to make sure they are doing the right thing, but so do jr engineers.

Anyways, those are the things that a code review would catch.

I think you got me wrong, sorry for not having myself made clearer. I worked through college as an IT consultant as well, however as you noted under supervision of a consulting company with seniors. Hiring a college student directly, without a company attached that can be made liable, is just a bad idea, both for the customer and the student. Just imagine the customer had sued parent. I wasn't talking about technical competence - it's all about liability as well as having proper processes for design, implementation, review, testing and rollout in place - a thing that can easily he seen even before signing a contract.

I agree with the sentiment, but in this particular case, do you really think an MBA'd IT manager was in charge of a project that paid $20 per hour? (As opposed to Accenture rates.)

No, I don't think so. On the other hand I do know a case with MBA type manager who gave away the job of doing their website to a complete amateur, just because he knew him. So it wouldn't surprise me either to be honest.