Can You Cook?

I was wandering around the Internet news sites today, when I came across an Associated Press article about a group of culinary school graduate who were suing the company that owned their school, claiming that they had been ripped off by recruiters promising readily available work and high wages after completing various (very expensive) training and certificate programs. The plaintiffs were being mocked in a variety of places on line for being gullible enough to spend $30,000 or more for a certificate qualifying them to work in an industry where the entry-level job is generally an $8/hour line cook’s position – and if that’s what actually happened, the people in question might actually deserve it. However, I believe the question here isn’t so much whether these former students made a bad choice (they did) as it is whether they were actually defrauded by the school’s recruiters…

As noted previously, if it ever becomes illegal to make money off the credulous, the greedy or the stupid, our economy will probably collapse – and anyone who could honestly believe that a seven-month training program could replace a dozen or more years of education and apprenticeships probably falls into one or more of those categories. But people who were promised those results – or, at least, more than an $8 per hour job after graduation – by an apparently legitimate company aren’t exhibiting that behavior, any more than anyone else who is promised a specific outcome from an investment. Which is kind of the point here: telling someone that their investment WILL be worth 300% of its current value in three years is a crime; telling someone that their investment COULD be worth that much isn’t. This is why those commercials you see for investment companies always have disclaimers at the end about how they aren’t guaranteeing you anything. The company says they gave their prospective students such a disclaimer; the students say they didn’t. The court case will try to determine who’s right…

Part of the problem in these cases is that most people aren’t used to thinking of educational institutions the way they do about regular for-profit companies. There is a persistent belief in America (and much of the Western world, for that matter) that education is a noble pursuit, and the people who go into it are by definition driven by higher motivations than simply making money. Unfortunately, for-profit education companies (in this case, it’s Career Education out of Schaumberg, Il.) are only in it for the money, and make a lot of it off of students who don’t understand the difference. The worst of these scandals have been the Federal Financial Aid fraud cases that have popped up in recent years, where for-profit schools have advised students on how to get Federal aid packages and student loans, taken the money, and then flunked the students out of their programs three months later. No one is saying that the culinary schools in our story are doing the same thing – at least, not yet. The implication, however, is that this is just the same scam with a different sauce over the top…

The other problem in this case is that the company appears to have made good on its agreements to educate the students. It’s possible that they misrepresented the value of those degree and certificate programs, but there doesn’t seem to be any question that they actually provided the training they were contracted to provide. It also seems reasonable that the plaintiffs could have made use of any of a dozen different online tools to check both the availability of entry-level cooking jobs, and the salary levels associated with those positions. Unless the plaintiffs can prove that they were actually given incorrect information with fraudulent intent, it will be very difficult for them to make their case…

Of course, it’s also possible that they’ve received incorrect information from their attorneys regarding how easy such a case is to win, or how much they will receive in compensation if they do prevail. But that’s a discussion for another day…