Interesting article on anarchy, autocracy, and censorship at the CIA (no, not that CIA). It seems that for $25K/yr, chefs-in-the-making are learning to cook frozen waffle fries. Must be some damn good waffle fries?
fissure
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Interesting article on anarchy, autocracy, and censorship at the CIA (no, not that CIA). It seems that for $25K/yr, chefs-in-the-making are learning to cook frozen waffle fries. Must be some damn good waffle fries?
Playing with Fire and Water 
Maybe they are teaching them the realities of what most cooks from school become. har. 25k a year for school and I thought paying 4k was alot hah
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One of my cooks graduated last year from Johnson and Wales and has flat out told me that it was a waste of his time and money.
It’s really a double edged sword in the corporate restaurant business.
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I currently go to Johnson and Wales and it is a waste of money, I have hardly learned anything. I plan on going to a different school to learn nutrition next year instead of spending 3x the amount to go to Johnson and Wales. Culinary schools aren’t teaching you anything more than you could learn in 3 months in a professional kitchen.
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Ditto. Ditto. Ditto!
This is obviously a touchy area that needs to be seriously addressed before it results in a complete change in our American system of culinary education.
The situation developing at CIA reminds me of J&W over 10 years ago when I graduated that from the RI campus. You cannot enter a ‘classroom’ without being bombarded with product advertisements. McCormick and Coors (yes, Coors) were 2 of the biggest names on campus at that time. With the mega-high price of tuition (which I am still paying to this day) I consider school as a formality that I had to undergo to be taken seriously in this field. Currently, students who got ripped off 10 years ago are now in prominent culinary jobs and know first hand that the interns they have coming in are not fit for entry level kitchen postitions. The chickens are coming home to roost.
We have almost all but stopped accepting interns from both J&W and CIA in our kitchen. The only school we are currently working with is the local Le Cordon Bleu. We have accepted one J&W student for this year, but it was only because the student took his the initiative to search us out and take a personal interest in his career by working with us.
The schools have been taking advantage of the fact that misguided chef wannabe’s will pay their ridiculous tuitions for too long now. They can just keep cranking them out, and we’ll just refuse to hire them until one of us gets the message. As soon as their employment placement rate drops to uber-low percentages, they will see the light of the flourescent kitchen lights!
What’s next for culinary education in America? Small schools for focused undistracted learning or taking the initiative to work for real chefs and learn via apprenticeship solely?
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