Portland's Western Culinary Institute implicated in lawsuit (Phoenix: attorneys, job market)

[hamellr]

In short, the Western Culinary Institute here in Portland, along with several other culinary "for-profit" schools is being sued by former students for deceptive advertising about job placement rates post graduation.

Culinary school grads claim they were ripped off | Deseret News


I'm posting this here due to the large number of people coming to these forums who say they are attending cooking school here. This same warning applies to companies like University of Phoenix and any other for profit schools, usually advertising "Adult Education," classes.

[Minervah]

I got my paralegal degree from what was then Western Business College. It's now called Everest College. It's one of those types of schools like Western Culinary. When the recruiter was trying to sell me on it, she told me they had an excellent job placement department and I would be able to find a job easily. They all do it.

However, the actual teachers who were all attorneys advised their classes to look elsewhere in the country for jobs since the Portland market was pretty well saturated. They were right.

I understand that now that the recruiters are no longer so heavy-handed on the promises of jobs although they do have certain "in" with law firms.

The point is that people who want to attend these types of schools have to really do their own "due diligence" in determining what the job market for their major will be before they enroll.

Those students who actually believed they would have jobs waiting for them with the way the economy is were just being naive but I would agree that the school should not be promising more than it can deliver.

[Bluesmama]

My guess is that way too many students probably want their careers in the Portland area, and to accommodate them all, even in our restaurant-loving city, is simply not possible. A few may need to seek a compatible cooking career where they'd rather not be, but they need to start somewhere. I do agree with Minervah ~ they're naive, but the school shouldn't mislead.

[HonuMan]

Interesting. I wonder if it's any different with state-run colleges, though. When I got my first degree in Business Administration at a state university in the early 1980s, the guidance counselors and professors told us that we should expect to get three or four job offers prior to graduation through the school placement office, that we should choose the best one, and that we'd have a career for life at whatever company we chose, if we wanted one -- all because we'd gotten a four-year degree at a good college. I graduated in 1982 during a recession, couldn't find a job, and went back to school and took computer-programming classes until I was able to find a job the following year. Of course, the "job for life" model fell apart during the 1980s. It didn't occur to me that the guidance counselors and professors might be purposely misleading us -- I just assumed that they believed their own spiel, which applied to the pre-1980s world.

A few years later, after being downsized from several companies, I went back to school and finished an engineering degree at a state-run college to make myself more marketable. The school marketing department painted the same rosy picture about multiple job offers prior to graduation through the school placement office, but in the months prior to my graduatiion, very few companies were recruiting in my field of engineering, and I only had two interviews and no offers. Fortunately, I found a job on my own a month later, but it did make me question the school's job-placement claims.

I notice that the article doesn't give any information about the nature of the Culinary Institute's misleading statements. There's a difference between, say, "Eight-five per cent of our graduates find culinary jobs in the Portland area withing three months of graduation, at an average starting salary of $42,000" and "Our graduates are in high demand, and most find good jobs within a reasonable time period."