Top Chef and the Food Network have fueled the rise of the celebrity chef and it’s been very good for cooking schools. Students are filling culinary schools are unprecedented rates. Professional training can help cooks move up quickly through the kitchen ranks. And culinary schools have produced many of the nation’s finest chefs.

From All Culinary Schools – Top Chefs Who Attended Cooking School:

Emeril Lagasse – The Food Network personality and owner of many restaurants has made quite a fortune from cooking. He attended cooking school at Johnson and Wales after turning down a full scholarship to study music at the New England Conservatory of Music. Talk about talent! Lagasse also supports a number of charities through the Emeril Lagasse Foundation.

Ann Cooper – She calls herself the “Renegade Lunch Lady.” A former celebrity chef, who once cooked for the Grateful Dead, Chef Ann is now giving public school cafeterias around the country a major facelift. She’s currently Director of Nutrition at Berkeley Public Schools where she has replaced all canned and processed foods with fresh meat and vegetables and baked goods from local bakeries. Cooper studied at the Culinary Institute of America.

Erika Bruce – Bruce is a test cook on America’s Test Kitchen, public television’s most popular cooking show. On the show, test cooks like Bruce experiment with recipes and tinker with cooking tools to find out what works and what doesn’t. Bruce attended the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts.

Walter Scheib –As the executive chef at the White House for 11 years, Scheib was in charge of preparing meals for the First Family. Scheib’s book about his experiences White House Chef: Eleven Years, Two Presidents, One Kitchen came out in January, 2007. He graduated with highest honors from the Culinary Institute of America in New York in 1979.

Julia Child – She’s the queen mother of the culinary industry. In 1948, while her husband, an officer for a federal government agency, was posted in Paris, Child enrolled in the world famous Cordon Bleu cooking school. There was no turning back. After just six months of training, Child and two of her classmates opened up a cooking school of their own called L’Ecole de Trois Gourmandes. They also published a book together called Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Child promoted the book in the US and one Boston public broadcasting station found her so charismatic they gave her a cooking show of her own. The show was an immense hit – it was syndicated all over the country and won many awards, including an Emmy.

Although no one disputes that culinary training is essential to become a chef, attending a pricey culinary school can put you in the hole for years. The New York Times reported in May 2007 that culinary school graduates are defaulting on federal student loans at alarmingly high rates. The article advises culinary students to be very careful about how they pay for school and to exhaust federal and state loans before looking for alternative funding.

From the New York Times:

Top Chef Dreams Crushed by Student Debt

But would-be top chefs face a challenge that most lawyers, engineers or nurses do not: few jobs in their chosen field pay enough for them to retire their student loans. As a result, as many as 11 percent of graduates at some culinary schools are defaulting on federal student loans. The national average for all students last year was roughly half that, at 5.1 percent.

“The problem isn’t getting a job, the problem is getting a high-paying job,” said Susan Sykes Hendee, a dean at Baltimore International College and a member of the American Culinary Federation Foundation Accrediting Commission, which accredits many culinary schools.

Many of the schools offer two-year programs where the total tuition and supply costs can reach $48,000. Only a slice of that is covered by low-interest federal loans. For example, the most that students in two-year programs can currently borrow in federal loans is $14,125.

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