Culinary Arts is about average in terms of popularity for bachelor's degrees programs. That is, it ranks #216 out of the 363 majors across the country that we analyze each year. So, you may have to do some digging around to find quality schools that offer the degree program. This list can help with that.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 6 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for culinary arts students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 514 bachelor's degrees in culinary arts to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Culinary Arts School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The culinary arts bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality culinary arts program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a college'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.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of culinary arts students who choose to seek a bachelor's 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.
Student Debt - How much debt culinary arts students go into to obtain their bachelor's 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 culinary arts related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for culinary arts students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Culinary Arts Bachelor's Degree Schools ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
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It is hard to beat Culinary Institute of America if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in culinary arts. The Culinary Institute of America is a small private not-for-profit school located in the suburb of Hyde Park.
Culinary Arts bachelor's degree recipients from Culinary Institute of America get an earnings boost of approximately $13,865 over the average earnings of culinary arts graduates.
Johnson & Wales University - Providence is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in culinary arts. Located in the medium-sized city of Providence, JWU Providence is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
Those culinary arts students who get their bachelor's degree from Johnson & Wales University - Providence receive $2,832 more than the standard culinary arts student.
It's hard to beat Nicholls State University if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in culinary arts. Located in the small city of Thibodaux, Nicholls State University is a public university with a medium-sized student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the culinary arts program report average early career wages of $23,038.
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).
The culinary arts bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality culinary arts program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
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