Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Schools to Close by 2017

CEC was unable to find a buyer for Le Cordon Bleu so they are closing those locations down.

 

I know that when regular academic schools close they have a teachout to allow students to finish up. Does that mean that Le Cordon Bleu will have a cookout?:arg::no1:

 

With the recent explosion of interest in culinary arts/cooking (TV shows such as Chopped and Restaurant Impossible), it's surprising to me that this is happening.

 

Nobody wants to buy career schools "as is" because of impending federal regulatory mechanisms that are going to be implemented in September of 2017 (or is it October of 2017?). Those impending regulatory mechanisms are only applicable to "career schools" (such as culinary arts, barber school, et al.) and are not applicable to colleges and universities that offer degrees i.e. Associates, Bachelors, etc. The federal regulatory mechanisms will make it almost impossible for "career schools" to receive Title 5 funding -- and that's why there are no buyers for career schools. It's cheaper for CEC to just to sell the properties for market value.

 

I'm so happy to hear this. This school has been such a huge disruption in my field on so many levels. Sadly, I have a lot of friends who are on faculty at a few locations, but it's still a good thing. Culinary Arts has been (still is?) the biggest student loan default category- and schools like LCB are why. Now, yes, I understand that the other 2 big players are expensive, but degrees from JWU and CIA still land you a good job. LCB kids are leaving culinary school and walking into jobs they could get without a degree or the debt that it brings.

 

it already hit max load capacity, I think this bubble has reached max load and is bursting, this is just the beginning. Industry has spent the last 10 years struggling to accommodate the endless demand of more slots for students and then jobs for the graduates. Working as a cook still doesn't require a degree, but when every Tom Dick and Harry has one, the entire float line rises and you get line cooks with $100k student loans making $8/hour for the next 5 years. Next time you visit a restaurant, ask yourself how many chefs are in the kitchen (one) and how many minimum wage cooks (everyone else).

 

Liberty should buy them and offer a BS in Biblical Cooking

 

Gordon Ramsey should buy Le Cordon Bleu College

 

Maybe Robert Irvine could buy it and turn it into a reality tv show called "college impossible" and do a big makeover.

 

the USA franchises should close and it should go back to being exclusively available in FRANCE taught in FRENCH. It used to be regarded as the most elite cooking school in the world.

 

I graduated from Le Cordon Bleu:

 

While I do know at least one person who credits her Arts Institute education with accelerating her culinary career, I believe she would also concede that the debt load is simply too much for what she received.

Of course, I also feel that former military tend to avoid some of the high debt loads reported at many for-profit schools because they often have the GI Bill dragging down the total cost.

If the total cost of your BS is going to be, say, $75k federal financial aid may take a bite of that but you're still going to be left with a sizable debt. If you have the GI Bill on top of that, however, all of the sudden the debt becomes more manageable.

That's not to say that schools charging this much is a good thing. But when you have a segment of students who walk away with 1) less debt than the typical student and 2) more discipline than the average student you're writing a recipe (see what I did there?) for those particular students to be more successful. So it ends up skewing the outcomes a bit.

I graduated from CTU with very little debt for a bachelors degree. I owed more for my associates at U of S than I did for the remainder of my undergrad education at CTU. But, I also had the GI Bill to help me chip away at the cost. And, when I sat down prior to enrolling and ran the numbers, it wasn't a bad price tag, in my opinion, when I compared it to the cost of other private universities (like U of S). If I didn't have the GI Bill, I likely would have rethought that choice and looked for cheaper options.

But, for LCB, it sounds like their graduate outcomes were shaky and CEC is making a solid business move to divest themselves of it. I suspect that these new rules are going to have the greatest impact on career schools and associates programs. It will be interesting to see what a leaner, meaner for-profit education sector looks like after these changes.

 

At LCB, that $75k only gets you an associates!

 

Associates degrees, in general, are problematic when their cost exceeds a very low threshold. It was associates that were cited as the biggest problem at Everest and I saw a statement from that SUNY Albany professor who writes about accreditation and for-profits that said associates and certificate programs are really the biggest culprits.

Unless your associates qualifies you for a license of some sort the degree's overall utility is severely diminished. Job postings at my company were edited to remove most associate requirements (we either dropped the requirement to a high school diploma or increased it to a bachelors degree or, more often, added more levels to the job family and did both).

Here's why I think this is a great victory; UofP found its initial success going after mid-level executives who needed an MBA and nurses who wanted to further their education. People who already had jobs and likely had employers willing to kick in. When the schools target low income individuals, the likelihood that they will be able to pull themselves out of poverty with a mountain of debt is already unlikely. Add to that the fact that the "career" they are preparing for has very low earning potential as-is and you get, well, exactly what we have.

For better or worse, I think the era of the career school is dead. There's no more spending a year at secretarial college and then getting a "good" job. There's skilled trades, there's professional pathways (which require specific degrees) and there are miscellaneous jobs that require a college education but folks are pretty flexible as to what you actually study.

The simple fact is that you can go to truck driving school and go out and get a decent paying job. You can't really do that with many of the "career" programs out there today. And, in some areas, even truck drivers are flooding the market because THOSE schools are cranking out too many people for the local market to absorb. As long as degrees keep inflating, the value of the lower tier education credentials will keep declining. There's a reason that so many community colleges are shifting from "come here and get an education to enter the workforce" to "come here and get cheap credits to transfer to a four year school."