It's not often that food writing and education wonkery collide. But Ben Miller did a good job of it yesterday, when he pulled out "cohort default rates" -- a metric that "measures how many student loan borrowers from a graduating class default on their debt within two years of graduation" -- to figure out if culinary school was worth the cost. CDRs are useful for this because lone default tends to signal that the borrower hasn't found a job. And if a professional education, like culinary school, isn't catapulting you into work, then it's not doing its job. On average, the CRD is about 5 percent. Miller found that for culinary schools, it's a bit higher: 6 percent. But that's not bad. And if you attend the Culinary Institute of America, which is the flagship culinary school, it's only 2 percent. But below that, the default rate rises, and fairly few of these schools participate in federal loan programs, so it's probably not that good of an idea. The other thing you'd want to test is the outcomes for aspirational chefs who decide to eschew formal training and go straight to a kitchen. If the outcomes are no worse, but you spend a few years being paid money rather than paying someone else money, that's a good deal. It's somewhat analogous to journalism, where you can go to J School, but few in the industry would recommend it, and almost no one considers it a good deal. Better to actually do the work, as that's what will get you hired.
