OK Culinarian, I did a bit of digging, and heres what I found... NECI offers a BA in hospitality and management. Their cirriculum looks to be very good, focusing on those who want to manage/own their own business. I couldnt find out what the cost for the full four years was, but for the associates(2 year) program it was just shy of 50,000$ which includes all costs from tuition to books and housing. Take a look at neculinary.com and see for yourself. As for J&W....not much was to be said of the programs on their site...they mentioned a few of the classes offered; but no complete descriptions of them. I believe J&W is around 18,000$ a year tuition, plus additional costs. They can be found at jwu.edu
Another school you might want to look into is Paul Smiths in upstate NY. It is quite a bit smaller than the others, a good school in its own right. I friend of mine graduated from there a few years ago....he loved it and is now a sous chef for a large hotel corporation. That school runs around 13,700$ per year. They are at paulsmiths.edu Also if you want to check out the CIA's programs, they offer a BPS in culinary arts and pastry arts. The total cost of the program (which gets you out of school in 38 months due to not much time off for summer and some saturday classes), is aroud 80,000. Right around the same as J&W as well as NECI. At their site are complete program schedules as well as course descriptions for every class. The big advantage I saw over the CIA's cirriculum is that everyone follows the same scheduling. They start 5 new classes every three weeks, so everyone starts out with the basics, ie culinary math, sanitation, product identification etc. Then you move into the skills kitchens and start with the basics there, ie knife skills, stocks, sauces etc. They also offer continuing education at the new campus at Greystone in Napa Valley CA. Its worth checking out, you wont be sorry. You can find them at ciachef.edu
Good luck and let us know how your search is going!
Ciao.....paisan
