Maintain Oversight for Trade Schools

The abrupt closing of the Los Angeles Culinary Institute is a throwback to the 1980s when California was derided as a world center of fraudulent trade schools. These so-called diploma mills or phantom schools took students’ money and then folded, leaving the students in debt and without a diploma.

That is the dilemma now faced by about 60 student chefs who shelled out $20,000 in tuition to the Encino institute only to have the school close and the owners disappear. Some of the students were only weeks away from graduating.

An analyst with the state agency that licenses private schools to operate in California has been meeting with the distraught students, going over their options for recovering tuition and transferring credits. She has also been trying to track down the institute’s owners.

Only one of the school’s six managing shareholders has had the guts to face the angry students so far. And she claims to be a victim herself, having unadvisedly invested her savings in the school earlier this year.

Los Angeles’ other culinary schools should work with the state bureau and do all they can to welcome transfer students who have invested not just tuition but time in pursuing their dreams of becoming chefs.

And Gov. Gray Davis and state legislators who--reluctantly and stingily--fund the Consumer Affairs Department, where the trade school bureau is housed, need to keep in mind the role the agency plays in safeguarding students. About 200 schools in the state close every year, according to the bureau, but only about 20 shut down abruptly like the Culinary Institute did. These days such a closing is news, not the norm, and that is to the credit of stepped up oversight.