Wroughtirony posted:

The long-term usefulness of a culinary degree mostly pertains to non-cooking jobs. It's a nice feather in your cap if you want to work as a rep, work FOH someplace fancy, work for a winery or manage FOH or be GM of a smaller place. It can offset the blow (slightly) of not having a Bachelors in a food-related job.

None of these are good reasons to get a culinary degree, I'm just pointing out that it's not complete toilet paper, just mostly toilet paper.

In my opinion the ONLY good reason to go to culinary school is as follows: You're wealthy or someone else is paying for it. The cost of culinary school is so ridiculous that it's impossible for most people to pay the loans on a cook's salary. IMPOSSIBLE. If you're getting a free ride, go right ahead! Culinary school is FUN. You get to play with all kinds of fun ingredients and learn some old-school techniques that will help you gain a good foundation for future learning. When you graduate, you will be totally unprepared for life in a real-world kitchen, but you will have a skill set that will allow you (if you apply yourself) to progress far more quickly than you would otherwise. Think of it as a pass for the HOV lane.

tl;dr: Culinary school owns, it's PAYING for it that sucks, do it if you're loaded but don't expect to come out of it as anything but an overqualified prep cook.