Food show craze helps fill culinary arts classes

PHOTOGRAPHER: Justin Mason

There was a time when David Brough would have been surprised to see 200 students enrolled at Schenectady County Community College’s culinary school programs.

Founded in 1982 and accredited by the American Culinary Federation in 1993, the college’s hotel, culinary arts and tourism department usually drew about 160 students per year. Brough recalls seeing enrollment spike to more than 200 students one year and thinking that the program had finally reached its apex.

“I remember when we hit 200 students,” he said Friday. “Two hundred was a big deal.”

But that was before America’s love affair with food kicked into overdrive. The proliferation of food-centric reality television shows coupled with already prevalent Food Network has caused a spike in the number of people seeking training in the culinary arts.

From the Bravo Channel’s “Top Chef” to “Hell’s Kitchen” on the Fox Network, people are tuning into their obsession with food. And it’s prompting many of them to search out programs offered by Brough’s department and other culinary schools in the area.

Department heads at both the state University of New York in Cobleskill and Paul Smith’s Col-

lege at Saranac Lake reported a pronounced enrollment increase for their culinary programs over the past three years. Increased enrollment prompted Paul Smith’s to institute a waiting list for one program for the first time last year.

Kathy Fitzgerald, Paul Smith’s vice president for enrollment management, said about 35 percent of the college’s 1,000 students are enrolled in culinary programs. She said inquiries into the hospitality programs have increased 23 percent this year, while commitments for incoming students to the culinary arts and baking program have increased 59 percent for the fall semester.

“We are essentially almost out of room and we’re going to a waiting list,” she said.

In Schenectady, Brough said enrollment grew from 270 students in 2007 to 412 last year. The jump was made possible by the completion of a new culinary wing in 2007.

“We had a huge jump in enrollment,” he said.

The program has also seen a pronounced change in demographics. When Brough first began teaching at the college in 1988, roughly 75 percent of the students were young men.

Today, about 51 percent of the culinary students are female. Students now attending the college range in age from 16 to 74.

At Cobleskill, enrollment seems to gradually creep up every year, said Dave Campbell, the department’s chairman. Now, he said, the culinary programs are starting to outpace others at the college.

“The numbers are certainly up, which has been kind of neat because the numbers for a lot of other programs are going down,” he said.

Students are a lot more knowledgeable about food when they arrive, too. Campbell said this awareness appears to be tied to the increased prevalence of epicurean television shows.

“The students are certainly watching a lot of the Food Network,” he said.

But in general, people seem more interested in professionally cooked meals, Brough said. Restaurant sales are projected to increase from $379 billion in 2000 to more than $604 billion by the end of this year, according to figures provided by the National Restaurant Association.

The restaurant industry now accounts for about 49 percent of money spent on food in the United States. The industry employs 12.8 million people at 960,000 locations across the country.

“The food channel brought a lot of people to us, but the industry is viable as a whole,” he said.

Viable enough to allay any fears over the job market getting saturated by the sudden influx of new workers. Both Brough and Campbell believe the growth of the restaurant industry as a whole will provide more than enough jobs for the students they’re teaching today.

Campbell said the demanding industry also tends to wear its workers out quickly. He said job turnover is rather high, meaning there’s almost always employment opportunities for young chefs who are willing to work hard and relocate.

“It’s a very hard business,” he said. “Just a lot of people seem to wash through the system.”