California Culinary Academy Settles Lawsuit With Students for Millions

From SF Weekly,

The lawyers wanted to prove Matt Foist was dumb. He recalls attorneys questioning him for hours about his decision to enroll in the California Culinary Academy, a for-profit school in Potrero Hill.

"At the end of the day I just had to shake my head and say, 'You're right. I'm a fool. You're absolutely right,'" Foist says. "They put the class catalog in front of me and said, 'It says right here you're not necessarily going to become an executive chef when you get out of the school.' I said, 'It does say that. But you guys sold it so well that I didn't think it was significant at the time.'"

The occasion was Allison Amador et al. v. California Culinary Academy, a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of former CCA students. San Rafael attorney Ray Gallo filed the suit after being inspired by the 2007 SF Weekly feature "Burnt Chefs" [Eliza Strickland, 6/6/2007], which showed how the school urged students to take on tens of thousands of dollars in government loans to pay for what many graduates considered substandard training. Students claimed in court they'd been defrauded. Next came depositions, and lawyers' questioning.



But those lawyers learned that Foist, an engineer at a Mountain View accounting software company, may not have been so stupid after all.

As we reported online last week, former CCA students recently received notice that the school's parent company, Career Education Corporation, had agreed to pay out more than $40 million to settle the suit without admitting wrongdoing.

The lawyers "gathered around me and made me feel insignificant, uneducated, and foolish," Foist says. "So when they decided to settle and give money to the class, that really surprised me."

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