Posted on 08/30/2018 9:12:49 AM PDT by 11th_VA
For Alexandria Butler-McDow, 28, going to university didnt provide the freedom and financial security she'd hoped for. After graduating with an associates degree from the California Culinary Academy (CCA) in San Francisco, CA, in 2008, Butler-McDow struggled to find a job that would allow her to support herself and her disabled mother while also paying off her enormous student loan bill.
Hopeful that a more advanced degree would help her make more money and better manage her debt, Butler-McDow went on to pursue a bachelors degree in culinary nutrition, concentrating on clinical dietetics at Johnson and Wales University (JWU) in Providence, RI. By the time she had finished her second degree, Butler-McDow was even deeper in debt.
Now, nearly four years after graduating with her second degree, Butler-McDow (better known as Chef Alexandria at Better Taste Productions) is a Los Angeles-based chef and culinary consultant focusing on nutrition and education and she is still six figures in debt. Though she has defaulted on her loans and deferred some of her payments, the end of this ordeal is still out of her reach. We are sold the notion that getting an education is what will improve our socioeconomic standing, Butler-McDow told Refinery29. My degrees were supposed to bring me out of poverty but theyve just anchored me. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Sue the involved institutions.
One of my son-in-laws never went to college, just average grades in high school. He did however hold various jobs in restaurants and learned to cook while earning money. All without college. But... he pulls in over $5000 after expenses selling lemonade at weekend events, can make enough money in a few weeks to last the year. He has vendor trailers and permits. Yes, makes more money with lemonade than cooking (but it's awesome lemonade). Outside that, he does carpentry and sheetrock, no college required, no loans to worry about.
The California Culinary Academy is not a community college. It's a group of buildings sprinkled around SF that specializes in training cooks and chefs, and they run restaurants within the building offering fancy fare. I've attended lunches there with business groups, and the food and service is indeed fancy. I doubt that she spent that much just for the associates, must have included the bachelors degree also.
She was probably bucking for a star slot on The Food Network Channel
No, you’re an inveterate anti-woman poster. I thought most of you guys had gravitated towards the Q threads but here you are off-topic as always!
Now that’s a success story! And the best part - he probably get paid in cash for the most part.
So your son has a food cart or trailer? That’s very cool. The best coffee I ever had was from a Vietnamese guy who had his own little truck right outside NYU.
Good luck to your son!
$10.00 would have bought her both a used Betty Crocker Cookbook for the basics along with a used Julia Child’s Master the Art of French Cooking for graduate studies. Not knowing she’d racked up $100k in debt and didn’t care proves she’s too stupid to boil water.
Claim she’s gay and the Red Hen will hire her.
LOL. That's pretty stupid on the stupid scale.
There used to be (probably still are) government programs that teach a trade, pay for campus dorms and give you 40 hours/wk min wage.
In CA, there’s all sorts of tv shows like Master Chef or Chopped or Best Baker she could have signed up for. Or get a couple of her equally unemployed culinary school friends and go on Food Truck Race. She could have applied for a job at a legitimate restaurant and worked her way up rather than scooping ice cream at the mall. If she were any sort of self starter, which she’s proven she isn’t but I’ll play along, she could have used that $100k to open her own restaurant.
My son-in-law has a food trailer, and a wooden stand. Depending on the event, he might bring the wooden stand pieces via his pickup truck and then assemble the stand (one he built himself). His family has done events for decades, between him and his brothers they have multiple trailers but it’s not their main gig, just a side thing. Right now, he’s trying to build a restaurant within his building. He and my daughter bought a rundown apartment building for cheap, and are converting it to a combination residence and cafe. Upper floor is the residence. Nice thing is they own it outright, so no lease problems when they get a cafe going. They’ve been doing this on a shoestring budget, with minimal costs and no loans. My daughter, having a university degree, has a good job so income is steady, but will quit when they get the cafe going.
Women used to know how to cook.
With some degrees you can find jobs, with other degrees you can’t. She got a degree that is not much in demand.
Also, she could have worked while going to college, instead of accumulating a huge debt.
I would say education is less than half the equation - much less than half.
I was telling Chickensoup some time ago about my experience with the insurance companies - I had passed the first two actuarial exams with flying colors, but even before that I met with the companies that came to campus. I asked them what courses to take and that sort of thing, and they don’t give you a straight answer. I suppose (1) they don’t want to feel obligated, and (2) education really isn’t that important.
You go on the interview and what do they ask you?
What was your most satisfying experience, biggest disappointment, what do you do for fun? What other jobs have you held? There was nothing at all about what did you learn.
Griggs vs. Duke Power needs to be vacated.
That sounds great. Again, good luck.
I’ve never seen a better explanation for this! Being blessed with an IQ over 100, it never dawned on me that’s why people get scammed and taken advantage of. And no I’m not being sarcastic. It’s like a bell just went off in my head.
The root cause of the problem is that nobody would loan her $100K to open a restaurant, but it is easy to get in that kind of debt with guaranteed government loans.
Fedzilla need to be driven out of the student loan buiness and have their virtual monopoly on said business broken up and sold.
There are already two (perhaps more) replacement models successfully in place:
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