Ex-Cordon Bleu Portland Students To Get Tuition Money Back in Lawsuit

Former students of Portland’s Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts are set to get some of their tuition money back as a decade-long lawsuit filed against the school is being settled.

KGW News reports that the school’s past students will be eligible to receive 44 percent of their tuition fees or loan amounts back from the school.

A class action was launched against the school around ten years ago — according to the lawsuit, the school only equipped graduates for entry level jobs, and most graduates only entered minimum wage positions after finishing, despite paying around $40,000 in tuition.

Attorney David Sugerman who worked on the case told KGW that the issue at hand was that the school sold education to people who were unlikely to benefit from that education.

Furthermore, Sugerman also found that the school’s corporate parent, Illinois-based private education company Career Education Corporation, had made a deal with loan company Sallie Mae to charge students 44 percent too much in order to benefit the loan company (this is where the 44 percent figure in the settlement comes from).

Career Education Corporation shut down Portland’s Cordon Bleu in 2017 along with schools in other cities, but the closure had no connection to the lawsuit — the company cited new rules that limited federal funding to for-profit schools.

Past Cordon Bleu Portland students will be able to file claims for their settlements in March — only those who make those claims will receive money.

• Portland culinary students getting tuition money back after lawsuit [KGW]
• Le Cordon Bleu PDX to Shutter [EPDX]