SAN FRANCISCO – Food enthusiasts have been enrolling in culinary school in growing numbers, lured by dreams of working as gourmet chefs or opening their own restaurants.
For many graduates, however, those dreams have turned into financial nightmares, as they struggle to pay off hefty student loans and find work in a cutthroat industry known for its long hours and low pay.
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Now, some former students are suing for-profit cooking schools to get their money back, saying they were misled by recruiters about the value of culinary education and their job prospects after graduation.
“They just oversold it and pushed it. They made misleading statements to lure you in,” said Emily Journey, 26, a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against San Francisco’s California Culinary Academy, part of Career Education Corp.’s chain of 16 Le Cordon Bleu cooking schools.
Journey, however, may already be in line to get some of her money back. Under a pending $40 million settlement in state court, Career Education has agreed to offer rebates up to $20,000 to 8,500 students who attended the academy between 2003 and 2008.
In 2004, Journey was a recent high school graduate, dreaming of opening her own bakery, when she enrolled in a 7-month program in pastry and baking arts at the San Francisco school. Recruiters convinced her it was a worthwhile investment and helped her borrow $30,000 to pay for it.
After finishing the program, the only job she could find paid $8 an hour to work the night shift at an Oregon bakery — “something anyone could have gotten without a culinary certificate,” she said.
Journey, who now lives in Bakersfield, has abandoned her baker’s dream and now plans to attend community college to become a nurse or dietitian. Without the settlement money, she will be paying for that culinary certificate for another 15 years.
“Was it worth the money and the time to have this loan hanging over my head?” she asked. “Absolutely not.”
Two other Le Cordon Bleu schools — the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena and the Western Culinary Institute in Portland — also face lawsuits from former students who say they were duped by deceptive advertising, particularly the schools’ job placement rates.
Schaumburg, Ill.-based Career Education denies its recruiting practices are illegal, but its schools recently changed their policies to “ensure that students understand that we are not promising any specific job outcomes or salaries,” said spokesman Mark Spencer.
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