Le Cordon Bleu is one of the most well-known cooking schools in the world, and now, it’s the latest for-profit education company to falter. It announced this week it will be closing all its U.S. campuses, including its Scottsdale location.
Earlier this year, for-profit Corinthian Colleges closed all its North American campuses. Then, the federal government announced it was investigating the for-profit giant University of Phoenix. And while Le Cordon Bleu has not reached the same level of controversy, it has been the center of lawsuits.
Adela Soliz, with the nonprofit Brooking Institution, said there’s a growing understanding with for-profit education “that students who are enrolled in these colleges tend to accumulate a lot of debt, and that it’s not clear whether they’re graduation outcomes post-graduation outcomes make this debt worthwhile.”
Soliz cites a 2012 study that found students who enrolled at for-profit colleges later faced higher rates of unemployment and were more likely to default on school loans than students who had been to other private or public institutions. The study also found that many for-profit schools had engaged what it called “borderline fraudulent” recruiting techniques.
On top of that, Soliz said these for-profit schools tend to be more expensive than public schools, which are highly subsidized by the government.
“While the for-profit colleges were enrolling a very small percentage of undergraduates as a whole, a lot of federal financial aid was going to them,” Soliz said.
While it's estimated that enrollment tripled at such institutions between 2000 and 2010, for-profit students still make up less than 10 percent of undergraduates nationwide.
