2025 Best Culinary Arts/Chef Training Associate Degree Schools
73Colleges in the United States
3,952Associate Degrees
Ranked #38 in popularity, culinary arts/chef training is one of the most sought-after associate degree programs in the nation. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 73 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Culinary Arts/Chef Training Associate Degree Schools ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 3,952 associate degrees in culinary arts/chef training to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Culinary Arts/Chef Training School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of culinary arts/chef training for getting your associate degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on culinary arts/chef training students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of culinary arts/chef training students who choose to seek a associate degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized culinary arts/chef training related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for culinary arts/chef training students working on their associate degree.
More Ways to Rank Culinary Arts/Chef Training Schools
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Culinary Arts/Chef Training Associate Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
Best Schools for Associate Students to Study Culinary Arts/Chef Training in the United States
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing an associate degree in culinary arts/chef training. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
14 Top Schools for an Associate in Culinary Arts/Chef Training
Here are some additional great schools for Culinary Arts/Chef Training students that almost earned our Best Culinary Arts/Chef Training Associate Degree Schools award.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).