After spending years working on Wall Street, Ralph Casbarro of Ocean Township, a lifelong cooking enthusiast, is going back to school at Brookdale Community Colleges Culinary Education Center in Asbury Park. Casbarro cooks lamb osso buco in his home kitchen. / Mike McLaughlin/Special to NJ PRESS MEDIA
Written by
Bill Bowman

Staff Writer

OCEAN TOWNSHIP — Ralph Casbarro loves to cook.

So much so that last year, when the 50-year-old township resident was trying to decide on his second career, his wife steered him to the answer.

Knowing that her husband was considering returning to college to study the culinary arts, Leslee Casbarro told him that if he didn’t do it now, he never would.

So, six months ago, he began taking culinary classes at Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County.

“I find it interesting because for me, it’s not hard,” Ralph Casbarro said of his studies. “I just wanted something that I like to do.”

Casbarro is not alone. In 2009, the last year for which figures are available, nearly 21,000 of the more than 414,000 students enrolled in New Jersey’s 19 community colleges were 50 or older, according to statistics from the New Jersey Council of Community Colleges.

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