Posted on 08/30/2018 9:12:49 AM PDT by 11th_VA
For Alexandria Butler-McDow, 28, going to university didn’t provide the freedom and financial security she'd hoped for. After graduating with an associate’s 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 bachelor’s 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 they’ve just anchored me.” ...
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Except the degree is not worthless. A culinary degree can get you placed in a good restaurant, hotel, hospital, catering hall. Someone here suggested a prison - which strikes me as an excellent idea of where to begin.
In culinary school you learn how to order for a restaurant so that there is absolutely no waste, how to enlarge or cut back recipes for thousands of people (algebra) so that there is no waste, how to butcher a side of beef so that there is no waste, how to trim and cut vegetables so that there is no waste and how to serve and plate so that every dish is exactly the same. Not easy and hardly useless. You can take that knowledge into other businesses if you choose. And for others here, you can’t learn that reading the Fannie Farmer cookbook.
The problem may be that she’s lazy or she wants to start out at the top. There are many young people like that - male and female. You like to go off topic with your usual dumb ideas about women.
If Mark is a licensed master plumber, Mark made $70,000 in the first six months of this year.
There you have it. you omitted the possibility of both.
Given her attitude, she is probably an unhireable lazy prima dona
I’ve done some work at JW. It’s a beautiful school. Nice location. Nice campus. And as a culinary school, it’s pretty good.
But if she incurred $100k in debt for two years there she did not contribute a dime to her own education. What does she expect?
And like most liberal arts degrees, you have to work twice as hard AFTER graduation to make a living in your field. If that’s what you choose, fine. But don’t bitch about it later.
Well, we’ll never know, I guess. She chose a difficult profession under any circumstance. My husband ran a restaurant for about 22 years - he saw crazy chefs, dishonest chefs, drunken chefs, high as a kite chefs and sometimes a solid chef. Crazy business. The line chefs and the dishwashers were his favorites.
My daughter enlisted in the Army, served six years, then used the GI Bill to first get an AAS degree in EMS Technology. She got her Paramedic license and worked at a fire station for a couple years before going back to school and again, with the GI Bill and other state grants, getting her BSN.
She’s now a Level I Trauma Nurse working in the ER. She enjoys working in that branch of medicine very much.
When I visited my husband’s restaurant (which was attached to a private club), I always said hi to the dishwashers. Nice people. The chefs? Didn’t much care for most of them.
My oldest has an aerospace engineering degree, and my daughter has a biomedical engineering degree. Both found great, high-paying jobs right out of school.
Education is an investment.
The moral of this dummy’s tale is: Don’t blow it on something stupid.
They are all high or drunk or both
I’ve been a dishwasher at a camp for 15 years. We use the camp when we do Emmaus Walks. Our Kiwanis club “rented” an Applebees for a pancake fundraiser. You guessed it. They gave me the dishwasher. Before they could train me, I had finished 3 loads.
The other dishwasher at Emmaus is one of the professors that worked on the Flint Water problem.
One of my most fun jobs was when I was dishwasher at the college I attended. The job helped pay my bill.
When I was in culinary school, I always got stuck washing dishes because the kids were smart enough to take their time sampling the dishes we had just created. Wash, rinse, bleach, repeat. I suppose it could be meditative, I was just anxious to go home!
It’s more fun when you are doing it so that men and women can be drawn closer to Christ.
Perhaps. The thing is: will she be able to get a job which will pay enough to service her loan interest on $100K. If not, then she would have been better off going for a cheaper degree at a cheaper institution.
As it stands, she is now saddled with $100K in debt at 28, which reduces her probability of getting married and having kids.
She must open her own fabulously successful restraunt, get rich and pay off her loans as a buiness expense
That's the way to do it. Nursing and medics will always be in demand, and she has a career path (especially as nurses get more responsibility and training in the ongoing effort to contain costs) if she studies for her MSN degree on the side.
Too many hours of binge-watching Food Network led her to believe that a rich, glamorous life of being a famous Chef was a hop, skip and jump away!
Trump Labor Department Boosts Apprenticeship Push with New Website!
“Trump’s administration has aggressively promoted apprenticeships as an alternative to higher education, arguing there is a strong demand for skilled workers not currently being met and that they provide good-paying careers without having to incur the debt typically entailed by higher education,” Sean Higgins reports for Washington Examiner.
Yesterday, the Labor Department unveiled a new website to promote such opportunities, apprenticeship.gov—a one-stop resource for Americans looking to pursue one of these programs.
apprenticeship.gov
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