culinary school
Should you or should you not go to culinary school...this has been a hot topic...not just recently but for years. But all of a sudden it has blown up...
I am a culinary school instructor. I graduated from a culinary school. I also graduated from a four year university with a bachelors in hospitality management before going to culinary school. I began by working my way through the ranks before I had graduated the university. I was apprenticed to a CEC while in college. I have taught at two different schools. I have, in the restaurant, trained cooks who had hardly ever been on the line to be bad ass line cooks. So...let me begin.
The only way that culinary school will be a benefit to you is if you put in the work and the effort and the passion! And it helps if you have some sort of experience in a kitchen somewhere before you go so you have some clue as to what you need to get out of it.
I do not advocate students going to culinary school straight out of high school or changing careers into our industry without first having worked in a professional kitchen at some point. Even if it is fast food. For all of us chefs bashing on Mcdonalds and Wendys...these places are successful because they have systems in place; systems to produce a consistent product, systems to work quickly, systems to clean well, systems to provide a product in a timely manner, systems that have made money. Without a knowledge of these systems, a cook is at a disadvantage. So is a student.
If you gain some experience, and then go to culinary school, you have the potential to be able to utilize the resources available to you far better than if you had to start from scratch and learn how to clean and what a walk in is. That being said...the Michelangelos among us can probably be successful without working before going to school, but I don't really know many Michelangelos. If any.
If you go work prior to school in a kitchen, what you can get out of culinary school is a very broad base of experiences. You will be exposed to almost every aspect of the culinary field, from food science and sanitation, to business management and butchery. You will get to cook a myriad of dishes, and you will most likely have a variety of instructors who will be able to instill their experiences and their philosophies on your education. You might also have access to a culinary library, minds to pick, and you should most likely be surrounded by students who are as passionate about food and cooking as you are. That passion can carry you into new fields and cuisines, far from what you knew when you entered. It might also carry right out of the kitchen and into other food related fields, such as writing, journalism, photography, research, etc, etc, etc...You will also be subjected to discipline, exams, homework, projects, brigade lineups, pop quizzes, demanding instructors, whining classmates, people who don't know if they belong, or who cannot cook their way out of a bag, and everything else that you would get at any other post secondary school.
However, you will not be an expert at anything when you graduate. You will have been exposed to a broad base of subjects. Upon which you will have the rest of your career to build. And if you plan on becoming successful, I would suggest you make it a point to be a lifelong learner of new things regarding food. You WILL NOT be a chef, you WILL NOT be an executive chef, you WILL NOT be a sous chef, you MIGHT NOT even be a line cook...you MIGHT be a stage, or an intern, or a prep cook. You might be getting paid, you might not. You might be starting as an unpaid intern until you prove yourself. You might be opening your own restaurant with your fat trust fund...who knows...
You will most likely have incurred some debt along the way. Culinary school is expensive. You have to pay for the instructors, you pay for the ability to burn food over and over again until you get it right, you pay for everything else...including the high liability insurance to cover unskilled workers. Then there is all the administrative costs...librarians, financial aid officers, registrars, janitors, books, knives, uniforms, bandaids...well you get the point...it is expensive to run a school. Does that mean it is expensive to attend? Possibly...but you can get grants, and scholarships, and loans...yes those dreaded school loans. We all have them.
So do you need to spend 50, 60, 70, 80 thousand dollars? Do you need to go to Harvard to get an education? NO! You can get a great culinary education at many community colleges. Does having a degree from the CIA, or J&W, or NECI get you any farther along than if you went to went to Austin Community College, or Schoolcraft College? Not necessarily, especially since a lot of employers have a bad taste in their mouths form graduate from the 'big; schools. Not because the students didn't get a quality education, but because of the attitudes that because they went to one of the big three, they are Escoffier reborn...and don't want to work to prove it. But it is all relative.
What is your budget? Be realistic...you might at most make $10 an hour when you graduate...for a few years(the average long time line cook in Austin gets paid roughly $11.00, w/o benefits)...the culinary schools wont tell you that...because it is their job to enroll you and get your Title 4 funds. They don't care how you pay off your debt, as long as the school gets paid. So be ready to have up to $600 dollars a month of debt start needing to be paid off as soon as you graduate...no grace period. Can you afford that?
So...why should you go to school?
Once again, if you can budget it, and you put the effort in to milk the school for all it is worth, then it can give you a broad base of general skills really fast. It allows you the opportunity to experience more than one chefs training and perspective, more than one cuisines techniques and foods, more than one culture's ideas on eating and cooking. If...and only if...you go in wanting that, needing that, WORKING for that.
So the seedier side of our industry(the culinary education industry that is), is that the schools will tell you almost anything to get you enrolled. They will tell you that you will be a chef right when you get out, they will tell you that you will be making 50k in two years, they will tell you that you will have no problems finding a job, or that they have a 100% placement rate, or that you will have no problems paying off your loans. This, however, is BS.
So ultimately it comes down to you...what do you want...what do you need?
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I am a culinary school instructor. I graduated from a culinary school. I also graduated from a four year university with a bachelors in hospitality management before going to culinary school. I began by working my way through the ranks before I had graduated the university. I was apprenticed to a CEC while in college. I have taught at two different schools. I have, in the restaurant, trained cooks who had hardly ever been on the line to be bad ass line cooks. So...let me begin.
The only way that culinary school will be a benefit to you is if you put in the work and the effort and the passion! And it helps if you have some sort of experience in a kitchen somewhere before you go so you have some clue as to what you need to get out of it.
I do not advocate students going to culinary school straight out of high school or changing careers into our industry without first having worked in a professional kitchen at some point. Even if it is fast food. For all of us chefs bashing on Mcdonalds and Wendys...these places are successful because they have systems in place; systems to produce a consistent product, systems to work quickly, systems to clean well, systems to provide a product in a timely manner, systems that have made money. Without a knowledge of these systems, a cook is at a disadvantage. So is a student.
If you gain some experience, and then go to culinary school, you have the potential to be able to utilize the resources available to you far better than if you had to start from scratch and learn how to clean and what a walk in is. That being said...the Michelangelos among us can probably be successful without working before going to school, but I don't really know many Michelangelos. If any.
If you go work prior to school in a kitchen, what you can get out of culinary school is a very broad base of experiences. You will be exposed to almost every aspect of the culinary field, from food science and sanitation, to business management and butchery. You will get to cook a myriad of dishes, and you will most likely have a variety of instructors who will be able to instill their experiences and their philosophies on your education. You might also have access to a culinary library, minds to pick, and you should most likely be surrounded by students who are as passionate about food and cooking as you are. That passion can carry you into new fields and cuisines, far from what you knew when you entered. It might also carry right out of the kitchen and into other food related fields, such as writing, journalism, photography, research, etc, etc, etc...You will also be subjected to discipline, exams, homework, projects, brigade lineups, pop quizzes, demanding instructors, whining classmates, people who don't know if they belong, or who cannot cook their way out of a bag, and everything else that you would get at any other post secondary school.
However, you will not be an expert at anything when you graduate. You will have been exposed to a broad base of subjects. Upon which you will have the rest of your career to build. And if you plan on becoming successful, I would suggest you make it a point to be a lifelong learner of new things regarding food. You WILL NOT be a chef, you WILL NOT be an executive chef, you WILL NOT be a sous chef, you MIGHT NOT even be a line cook...you MIGHT be a stage, or an intern, or a prep cook. You might be getting paid, you might not. You might be starting as an unpaid intern until you prove yourself. You might be opening your own restaurant with your fat trust fund...who knows...
You will most likely have incurred some debt along the way. Culinary school is expensive. You have to pay for the instructors, you pay for the ability to burn food over and over again until you get it right, you pay for everything else...including the high liability insurance to cover unskilled workers. Then there is all the administrative costs...librarians, financial aid officers, registrars, janitors, books, knives, uniforms, bandaids...well you get the point...it is expensive to run a school. Does that mean it is expensive to attend? Possibly...but you can get grants, and scholarships, and loans...yes those dreaded school loans. We all have them.
So do you need to spend 50, 60, 70, 80 thousand dollars? Do you need to go to Harvard to get an education? NO! You can get a great culinary education at many community colleges. Does having a degree from the CIA, or J&W, or NECI get you any farther along than if you went to went to Austin Community College, or Schoolcraft College? Not necessarily, especially since a lot of employers have a bad taste in their mouths form graduate from the 'big; schools. Not because the students didn't get a quality education, but because of the attitudes that because they went to one of the big three, they are Escoffier reborn...and don't want to work to prove it. But it is all relative.
What is your budget? Be realistic...you might at most make $10 an hour when you graduate...for a few years(the average long time line cook in Austin gets paid roughly $11.00, w/o benefits)...the culinary schools wont tell you that...because it is their job to enroll you and get your Title 4 funds. They don't care how you pay off your debt, as long as the school gets paid. So be ready to have up to $600 dollars a month of debt start needing to be paid off as soon as you graduate...no grace period. Can you afford that?
So...why should you go to school?
Once again, if you can budget it, and you put the effort in to milk the school for all it is worth, then it can give you a broad base of general skills really fast. It allows you the opportunity to experience more than one chefs training and perspective, more than one cuisines techniques and foods, more than one culture's ideas on eating and cooking. If...and only if...you go in wanting that, needing that, WORKING for that.
So the seedier side of our industry(the culinary education industry that is), is that the schools will tell you almost anything to get you enrolled. They will tell you that you will be a chef right when you get out, they will tell you that you will be making 50k in two years, they will tell you that you will have no problems finding a job, or that they have a 100% placement rate, or that you will have no problems paying off your loans. This, however, is BS.
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The US government has just passed a slew of new educational reforms this year. Most of them aimed at the 'for profit' educational industry...this is not just culinary schools but a lot of trade schools etc. So, therefore most of these school no longer offer associates degrees like a lot of us culinary graduates have. Schools have begun to either go to a one year certificate program or a four year bachelors program. So either you get less of a program or more for more money. The bright side is that a lot of schools are now more reasonably priced...not cheap but more reasonably priced (for example ours is about 14 months and cost about 24K). Do we still have issues? Absolutely. Are we trying to fix them? Every day.So ultimately it comes down to you...what do you want...what do you need?
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