It’s hard to deny the allure of the celebrity chef. You get paid millions of dollars to cook. You’re on television. You visit your restaurants in Las Vegas and Miami. People buy your pots and pans and those weighty cookbooks. They adore you.

Of course the odds of this happening to you just because you like to cook and maybe even went to a culinary school are slim. When foodwriter Michael Ruhlman went to the Culinary Institute of America in 1996, he was one of 29,000 students across the country enrolling in a cooking program. Twelve years later, the number of students in culinary school shot up to 62,000.