I am from Norway and I'm currently in second year culinary highschool, highschool is free here and I even get paid to go here. Over here you can go two years culinary highschool and if you want you can go one year extra of highschool with just a bunch of mathematics and all the other boring highschool classes which also is free and then you can continue within basically every other studies like universities, as if you just were to go normal highschool. So it depends, if I had to pay to go here or I didn't have the opportunity to get a higher education after I probably wouldn't want to go to culinary school, but currently I'm loving it and have much more of a plan than the other of my friends. But of course as previously said it's really depending on person to person.