If you plan on getting your associate degree in hospitality management, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #51 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 37 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for hospitality management students pursuing a associate degree. Combined, these schools handed out 1,858 associate degrees in hospitality management to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Hospitality Management School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of hospitality management for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality hospitality program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a associate degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Average Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of associate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their associate degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on hospitality management students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of hospitality management students who choose to seek a associate degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How much debt hospitality management students go into to obtain their associate degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized hospitality management related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for hospitality management students working on their associate degree.
The hospitality school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Hospitality Management Associate Degree Schools.
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Valencia College is a great decision for individuals pursuing an associate degree in hospitality management. Located in the large city of Orlando, Valencia College is a public college with a fairly large student population.
Associate recipients from the hospitality management degree program at Valencia College get $3,935 above the typical college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
College of Southern Nevada is one of the best schools in the country for getting an associate degree in hospitality management. CSN is a fairly large public college located in the city of Las Vegas.
Students who graduate with their associate from the hospitality program state that they receive average early career wages of $23,035.
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).
Your choice of hospitality management for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality hospitality program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
