Culinary Arts is of the hottest associate degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #23 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
College Factual looked at 5 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Culinary Arts Associate Degree Schools in Florida ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 261 associate degrees in culinary arts to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Culinary Arts School for Your Associate Degree
The culinary arts associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. 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
The overall quality of a associate degree school is important to ensure a good 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 many resources a school devotes to culinary arts students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of culinary arts 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 culinary arts 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 culinary arts related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for culinary arts students working on their associate degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Culinary Arts Associate Degree Schools in Florida ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Any student pursuing a degree in an associate degree in culinary arts has to take a look at Valencia College. Located in the city of Orlando, Valencia College is a public college with a fairly large student population.
Students who graduate with their associate from the culinary arts program state that they receive average early career income of $25,227.
Any student pursuing a degree in an associate degree in culinary arts needs to take a look at Keiser University - Ft Lauderdale. Keiser University - Ft Lauderdale is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the medium-sized city of Fort Lauderdale.
Students who graduate with their associate from the culinary arts program state that they receive average early career income of $28,159.
Any student pursuing a degree in an associate degree in culinary arts needs to take a look at Miami Dade College. Located in the large city of Miami, MDC is a public college with a very large student population.
Associate recipients from the culinary arts program at Miami Dade College get $3,139 above the typical college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
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 associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. 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:
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