‘Top Chef’ Dreams Crushed by Student Loan Debt
Librado Romero/The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: May 8, 2007
Rick Park started working at a Jack in the Box in Austin, Tex., when he was 18. He moved on to sub shops, pizza parlors and chain restaurants, turning out hundreds of meals during a shift.
Two years after graduation, all the “Bam!” has been drained from the dream. Mr. Park makes $10.50 an hour at a bistro in Austin best known for its French fries, trying to pay down his student loans. While he dodges phone calls from the bank, his mother helps him make his $705 monthly payments, almost twice his weekly take-home pay.
“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Mr. Park, 29, said before starting another night shift at the Hyde Park Bar and Grill. “I put my degree on applications, and they make fun of me for it.”
In the way that the work of directors like Martin Scorsese flooded film schools with students in the 1970s, and the television show “L.A. Law” packed law schools in the 1980s, the rise of celebrity chefs has been good for culinary schools.
But would-be top chefs face a challenge that most lawyers, engineers or nurses do not: few jobs in their chosen field pay enough for them to retire their student loans. As a result, as many as 11 percent of graduates at some culinary schools are defaulting on federal student loans. The national average for all students last year was roughly half that, at 5.1 percent.
Although the restaurant industry is expected to create two million new jobs in the next decade, the Department of Labor reports that in 2005, the latest year for which data were available, the average hourly wage for a restaurant cook was $9.86.
“The problem isn’t getting a job, the problem is getting a high-paying job,” said Susan Sykes Hendee, a dean at Baltimore International College and a member of the American Culinary Federation Foundation Accrediting Commission, which accredits many culinary schools.
Many of the schools offer two-year programs where the total tuition and supply costs can reach $48,000. Only a slice of that is covered by low-interest federal loans. For example, the most that students in two-year programs can currently borrow in federal loans is $14,125.
So many of them seek money from banks that are usually recommended by the school. The terms on some of these private loans can quickly get a young person with little borrowing experience into financial trouble.
nytimes.com
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Reminds me of the subprime fiasco... ignorant borrowers, greedy schools and predatory lenders = trouble. |
