Ranked #23 in popularity, culinary arts is one of the most sought-after associate degree programs in the nation. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in Georgia to determine which ones were the best for culinary arts students pursuing a associate degree. Combined, these schools handed out 122 associate degrees in culinary arts to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Culinary Arts School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of culinary arts for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality culinary arts program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their associate degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their associate degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 - How many other culinary arts students want to attend this school to pursue a associate degree.
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 easy is it for culinary arts to pay back their student loans after receiving their associate degree.
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 schools for culinary arts students working on their associate degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Culinary Arts Associate Degree Schools in Georgia list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Every student pursuing a degree in an associate degree in culinary arts has to take a look at Helms College. Helms College is a fairly small private not-for-profit college located in the city of Augusta.
Culinary Arts associate degree recipients from Helms College receive an earnings boost of approximately $3,605 over the average earnings of culinary arts majors.
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
Your choice of culinary arts for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality culinary arts program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
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