The Culinary Institute of America

I helped drop off a student for her fall semester.

This food is so good. It is way better than you expect. They also seem to know culinary arts really well (though, I went their for a class field trip when I first reviewed it)

Beautiful Scenery

Beautiful campus.

If you are an international student who wants to study at the CIA, I suggest you read my experience before deciding whether to study at this school or not.nnThe CIA claims to be a non-profit school, but the school's system is unreasonable, as if it is a school that makes money for commercial interests rather than for the academic quality of students. The school forces students to buy meal plans, even if you live off campus. The meal plan system is also quite unreasonable. You bought the ingredients for your tuition to practice in class, but the school asked you to use the points of the meal plan to buy back the dishes you cooked in class again, that is, double charge. Usually the points of meal plan disappear on weekends, so even if students don’t want to buy things on campus, they are forced to spend some, causing a lot of food waste. At the same time, the points of the meal plan do not mean that everything can be bought, even if the ratio of it to cash is 1:1, the things you can buy are greatly restricted.nnThe cost of the graduation ceremony. Before COVID-19, the school forced students to pay $300. Now the graduation ceremony has become online, and many services have disappeared. The school still charges students $300, their reasons are administrative cost such as degree audits, conferring of the degree, updating records, communication with governmental agencies and the cost of the diploma ( printing and shipping). Are these services not available in normal universities? This is really a joke. For this fee, they have different opinions each time, but at the same time it is not like students clearly explain the source of this fee. If you don't pay this fee, you will not get your diploma.nnDuring the period of online courses, schools did not dare to open up the grading system for professors, because after the conversion to online courses, the quality of education dropped greatly. Some courses did not even have lectures, and professors used several YouTube videos as teaching materials. If you want to throw tuition into the water, this is a great place. Although I am an alumnus of the CIA, I really feel sad that the school system is so bad. This is why very few alumni of our school donate resources to the CIA. I believe that under the same tuition, there must be better choices. The CIA in my mind is not the number one culinary school. Even if they say it is, they have to do a good job and work harder to prove that they have this title. This school really makes me feel disappointed.