Career Education Corporation announced today that the totality of the 16 Le Cordon Bleu cooking schools in the U.S. will be closing doors by 2017.
All 16 Le Cordon Bleu cooking schools across the U.S. are shutting down, its money-losing parent company Career Education Corporation announced on Wednesday.
The academy won’t accept any more applications starting next year. January will be the start of the school’s final cohort and students can finish their career until September of 2017.
Todd Nelson, president and CEO of Career Education, which is Le Cordon Bleu’s parent company, blamed recent federal regulations for the school’s closure.
“New federal regulations make it difficult to project the future for career schools that have higher operating costs, such as culinary schools that require expensive commercial kitchens and ongoing food costs,” he explained in a press release, adding that despite his negotiations with potential buyers who could keep running the school, it wasn’t possible to get to an agreement in the end.
Le Cordon Bleu — which has 115 years of history — was the school of Julia Child, a known American chef and author of the famous cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But what should be regarded as a prestigious culinary school, has been involved in a controversy over recent years, until it was finally announced yesterday that it would be closed for good.
For starters, according to New York Daily, graduates accused the institution of deceiving students about their job opportunities after paying costly tuitions — that have ranged between $16,000 and $42,500 per year on 2014 and 2015.
That same mindset led former students to sue the institution, which received a class action lawsuit in 2013 for $40 million after prosecutors claimed that recruiters from Career Education Corporation had given them misleading job prospects, when in reality some of them were earning only $12 an hour or could only be employed on jobs that didn’t require a costly culinary tuition.
Other institutions on the country, such as the Minneapolis Community & Technical College, have announced the end of their culinary programs.
Source: CBS Minnesota