With a loss for words, I had to take some time to ponder about this school and the what it means to the culinary world. There has been a great debate about the quality of education young chefs recieve here. It's one of the oldest schools on the West coast and up until a few years ago, had a solid reputation as one of the best in the nation especially with the pairing with Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. People had pride in this school and if you attended, it would distinguish you from other schools since employers sought out CCA graduates.
Let me start this day over with a frantic text message from a friend of mine. We are both CCA graduates and she had heard on the local news, CCA has a class action suit against them for fraud - increasing the price of this school with the promise of becoming a celebrity chef and lowering the learning standard.
With chefs becoming celebrities on television, the amount of students for culinary schools have doubled, tripled, quadrupled in the past 10 years. It's a booming business - a lot of people want to jump on the band wagon of being a superstar chef with the chance of being on television, having their own show or at least being extremely wealthy. To these people, good food is not really the issue - it's becoming famous or the income, that's their motivation. Then there are people who enjoy cooking and become chefs for that reason - make good food while hanging with friends, making people happy through their bellies. Personally, I think the latter people make better chefs and serve better quality food since their primary focus is food and the fame and income are a side effect.
Little do most people know the food service industry only has 2 classes - the poor and the incredibly wealthy, there is no middle ground. Only people that have been in the food industry know this... or have friends in the industry. You start out near the bottom of the totem pole and work your way up. After you put in about 10-15, 20 years, and get an executive chef position will you actually start making the income. The only time this education will help you is perhaps get you in the door and gives you a taste of everything from various food ethnicities, to computer skills, wine pairing and even a little management skills. To advance in these areas, one would have to be in the industry for experience which is the only way to excel.
Some of my classmates thought that by graduating from school, it would automatically put them in a management position. These were the people that had never been in food service before and believed the school recruiter. Others were there to get into the management position and of course, there were others that were recent high school graduates that didn't want to go to an academic college but to appease their parents, decided a vocational school would be sufficient.
People from all walks of life were in my class. Cooking has no age limit... the oldest classmate was in her mid-50's and the youngest ones just graduated high school. We had a good range of people in age and cookery skills - about half the class had prior restaurant experience. And for the most part everyone was eager to learn. It helped that our first instructor is a really good chef... Chef Glenn is also a great teacher and even went beyond teaching us what was in the textbook. It made our sister classes a bit jealous that we were making things not on the syllabus but we thoroughly enjoyed our first 6 weeks with him.
I really believe if you are motivated to learn, you will learn something so in essence, you get out what you put into it. I think most of my classmates were all really good and for the most part we all gleaned as much knowledge as we could. There were some students in our sister classes that still did not know how to boil water, make pasta or make a viniagrette salad dressing upon graduation. Granted, the entire time in school was not all good. Along with the good, there were some really bad instructors and even some instructors who were burned out but were sticking to teaching for a few more years until retirement and it is disappointing to have chef instructors like that.
As far as too many students - there were way too many classmates. Starting out, we had 32 students to 2 chefs... the main chef instructor and the assistant chef instructor. A huge ratio that only got larger when all the assistant chefs were laid off. Eventually, our class number dwindled down to 28 but that is still a large ratio especially when classes were suppose to be maxed out at 20.
Read the article yourself if you like. This is the link:
http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-06-06/news/burnt-chefs
I guess what really bothers me with the article and the current state of the school is that at the City College the culinary students attend school with a longer day, it's 32 times cheaper and the local restaurants would choose a City College graduate over a CCA graduate because of their retained knowledge, reliability, etc. Even when I was attending CCA in 2005, alot of my classmates had a difficult time attaining a job because prior students gave the school a bad reputation by not showing up for work, embellishing their resume and lacking ethics. It also does not help the school's image by firing the two executive chefs. The school President when I attended is no longer there either. I knew there were a lot of disgruntled students, which have made the newspapers and local television news but now it seems, there are alot more angry students out there that I thought. At least some of the instructors were honest with us... my three favorite ones were very upfront Chefs Glenn, Holly and Jason - they informed us from day one that we'd be overworked, underpaid and under appreciated but to be a chef, one has to really be passionate about the food. That the quality and reputation of this school was slowly going downhill due to the corporate buy-out and we should glean all we can from all our chefs because in a few years the school and our diplomas will not mean much in the food industry... it looks like they were correct. Corporations are in the culinary field as a means of capitalization - cram future chefs into a school and extort as much money from them as possible.
The following link was cited in the SF weekly article. I thought to look it up and see what comments are posted about CCA. This is the link: http://www.yelp.com/ in the search, type in california culinary academy in san francisco, california. While some of these critiques are valid, there is something called common sense that would make you questions yourself if you really want to attend this school.
If you ask, did I waste my time attending CCA, I would answer no. I think it was well worth the time and I learned alot. But if you ask if I wasted a lot of cash, my answer would definately be yes - the schooling is way overpriced for the quality of education and the sister schools in Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon are almost half the cost. The admissions counselor didn't even want to talk to me until I told him I was already approved for a student loan. Warning signals should have sounded in my head but my reasoning in attending school in San Francisco versus Austin or Portland, is with the farmland and ocean in proximity, students would get the best of both worlds learning about farm and ocean fresh ingredients. Plus the fact that San Francisco is an international city where diversity thrives, it would be a melting pot of ethnicities and international ingredients. With these thought all in mind, I reasoned that was the difference in pricing and it would be a better quality education and school.
1 comment:
Well written article.
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