New recipe to become a chef
Community colleges provide a frugal option as traditional schools deal with challenges
HAVERHILL, Mass. — The students all wore white chef coats, houndstooth pants and short toques as they tasted their lamb tagines for salt. Floor-to-ceiling windows in the sleek kitchen framed a sweeping view of the Merrimack River.
Here, north of Boston in the culinary school at Northern Essex Community College, the students will learn about sous vide cooking, use pastry sheeters to laminate dough, break down whole pigs and try molecular gastronomy techniques. The job placement rate after graduation is 100%.
“There could be two or three jobs per student around here,” said Denis Boucher, the coordinator of the culinary program.
The price of that education: about $6,500 for a certificate and $14,000 for an associate degree — or less, as many culinary students receive grants or scholarships. Compare that with the Culinary Institute of America, an acclaimed private school where a single semester at its New York campus costs nearly $20,000.
Less than a decade ago, the number of culinary schools in the United States was rising rapidly. But the past few years have been challenging.
Confronted with increasingly steep operating costs and the pandemic, several schools have permanently closed campuses, including the New England Culinary Institute and the International Culinary Center (which licensed its curriculum to the Institute of Culinary Education). Johnson & Wales University, which has a well-known culinary program, closed two campuses in 2020. Even before the arrival of COVID19, Le Cordon Bleu closed all of its North American outposts.
What’s left, for the most part, are the most recognizable names — like the Culinary Institute of America and the Institute of Culinary Education, which each reported steady enrollment throughout the pandemic — and culinary schools at community colleges like Northern Essex, which has doubled its enrollment to 33 students since the program began in 2020 and expects to more than double that total this fall.
Many other community colleges have opened or expanded culinary programs in recent years, offering a high-quality education at a fraction of the cost of a private cooking school.
While they lack prestige, these institutes may be better matched to the current economy. They can be a crucial resource for a restaurant business in desperate need of line cooks and other skilled workers, as well as for students seeking to start a career without running up big debts.
The boom in community college cooking programs has caught the attention of local governments and businesses.
The state-of-the-art kitchens at Northern Essex Community College were built and equipped with funding from the state and support from Lupoli Cos., a Massachusetts real estate developer that owns the culinary school building and helped cover some infrastructure costs. Students can work in one of Lupoli’s restaurants, Bosa, as part of the curriculum to get real-world experience, and the school doesn’t have to pay any operational costs.
On a recent afternoon, students got a lesson in breaking down various meats at Haverhill Beef Co., a butcher shop.
“Community colleges are finding creative ways to be able to offer what these larger colleges had to spend so much money to offer,” Boucher said.