Hospitality and Culinary Schools for International Students

TL;DR: There are two separate systems here and they are often confused. TESDA National Certificates are short competency qualifications measured in hours — Cookery NC II is 316 nominal training hours, Bread and Pastry Production NC II is 141. CHED degrees such as BS Hospitality Management and BS Tourism Management are multi-year and carry a minimum 600-hour practicum under CMO 62, series of 2017. Very few culinary schools publish prices; Benilde does, and its AY 2025-2026 table shows a flat ₱9,090 international-student premium per term across programmes. The permit follows the route: a Special Study Permit for short non-degree training, a 9(f) student visa for a degree.

Two systems, not one market

Philippine hospitality and culinary training splits cleanly in two, and the split determines your fees, your timeline and your immigration paperwork.

TESDA registers technical-vocational qualifications. These are competency-based, assessed against a national standard and expressed in nominal training hours rather than years. CHED regulates degree programmes at higher education institutions, and its memorandum orders set the curriculum floor.

Neither is better in the abstract. A 316-hour Cookery NC II and a four-year BS Hospitality Management answer different questions. If you want to work a line quickly, the certificate route is faster and cheaper. If you want a degree that a foreign employer or a graduate school will recognise, the CHED route is the one.

The distinction also decides your paperwork, which is the part international applicants most often get wrong. A TESDA course is short-term and non-degree, so it sits under the Special Study Permit. A CHED degree at an accredited higher education institution sits under the 9(f) student visa. Choosing the school first and the permit afterwards is the wrong order, because a school that is not accredited by the Bureau of Immigration to accept foreign students cannot file either one for you.

What the TESDA qualifications actually contain

TESDA publishes a Training Regulation for each qualification. Each states a nominal training duration split into basic, common and core competencies. These are the figures from TESDA's own published documents:

"Nominal" means what it says: it is the design duration of the training, not a guarantee of your calendar. A school running Cookery NC II part-time on weekends will stretch 316 hours across many months. ISCAHM, for example, lists its NC II Certificate in Cookery as running six months or more on its published course calendar.

We could not retrieve fee figures from TESDA's promulgated assessment fees page this session, so we are not going to quote an assessment fee. Ask the accredited assessment centre directly, and treat any number you see on a third-party blog as unverified.

What the degree route requires

CHED Memorandum Order No. 62, series of 2017 sets the policies, standards and guidelines for BS Tourism Management and BS Hospitality Management. Two provisions matter most to a prospective student.

First, the practicum. The curriculum table lists "Practicum-BSTM and BSHM (min. 600 hours)" as a 6-unit requirement, and Section 9.5 sets the conversion: "1 Practicum unit is equivalent to at least 100 hours per term." Section 9.4 adds that "It is highly encouraged that the practicum venue should be accredited by the Department of Tourism or their equivalent, both for local and international placements."

Six hundred hours is a real commitment — roughly fifteen full-time weeks — and it is the part of the degree that produces the industry contacts. When you compare schools, compare where their students actually do those hours.

Second, the order says the practicum units "may be broken into 2 subject offerings, assigned to different semesters, in different areas or in different levels of operation." So the 600 hours may be split, and where a school splits them tells you something about how it sequences the degree.

Programme length varies with the academic calendar rather than being fixed nationally. Benilde runs its International Hospitality Management degree over 11 trimesters, which it describes as three years and two terms under normal conditions. Semester-based universities generally run four years.

The published prices

Here is the honest state of price transparency in this sector, based on what the schools themselves publish.

De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde publishes a full undergraduate tuition table for AY 2025-2026, with a separate international-student column. These are sample first-term figures on full payment:

Two things to read off that table. The international premium is a flat ₱9,090 per term, identical across every programme, so it is a fixed foreign-student fee rather than a percentage uplift. And these are term figures on a trimester calendar, so multiply by the number of terms in a year before comparing against a semester-based school. Our USD conversions use the Bangko Sentral reference rate for 20 August 2026 (US$1 = ₱61.8660); Benilde's own document footnotes a rate of ₱55.60 to the dollar as of 20 May 2025, which is a useful reminder that peso prices and dollar prices drift apart.

Enderun Colleges publishes an estimate rather than a tariff: undergraduate programmes "Starts from PhP 300,000 Per semester (18 weeks)" for local residents, based on a maximum of 24 units and including miscellaneous and IT fees, described as estimates for SY 2025-2026. The page notes that additional foreign fees may apply to international students without stating an amount, and that tuition does not increase annually once you are enrolled.

ISCAHM, the Center for Asian Culinary Studies and Global Academy publish course information but no tuition figures on their own sites. ISCAHM's course calendar is detailed on schedule and duration — 13-month professional culinary courses in Pampanga, Cebu and Quezon City, three-month fundamentals courses, two-day masterclasses — and silent on price. Global Academy publishes payment options and financing partners but no amounts.

That is not unusual for culinary schools anywhere, but it does mean the only reliable comparison is one you build yourself from written quotes. For the wider budget picture around tuition, see our cost of studying in the Philippines for international students.

Industry placement: what the schools claim

Placement is the main thing hospitality schools sell, so read their claims as claims and attribute them accordingly.

Enderun Colleges states on its internships page that it has "More than 900 industry partners" and "33 countries as internship destinations", and answers the question of which destinations suit which major directly: "Culinary Students: France and the USA – Hotel Administration Students: USA, Hong Kong, Spain, Portugal, and South Korea."

Benilde's Vatel programme page says all students may spend 6 to 12 months in a luxury hotel or resort in the US through the International Trainee Network, may spend 4 to 5 months in Jumeirah-owned hotels and resorts in Dubai in collaboration with the Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management, and that culinary students may join a five-month programme in Italy through ICIF or IFSE, or take a first practicum in Nimes, France through Vatel Nimes. Crucially, the same page states these are all optional and that "related expenses (i.e. program fees, airfare, accommodation, living expenses, etc.) are not part of the regular tuition and fees."

That caveat applies to every school selling an overseas placement. An international practicum is usually a separate purchase, and often a large one. Ask for the all-in figure and the visa responsibility before you weigh it as a selling point.

Permits: which one, and when

The route determines the paperwork.

For short-term, non-degree training — a TESDA certificate course, a professional culinary programme, a three-month fundamentals class — the Bureau of Immigration's Special Study Permit is the normal instrument. BI's own page states that "Foreign nationals who do not qualify for a Student Visa may still avail themselves of special study permit", and lists fees of ₱2,000 application, ₱1,000 implementation, ₱200 service, ₱500 certificate and ₱40 legal research, plus US$50 for the ACR I-Card, noting the fees date from 2014 and may change.

The gating item is not the fee. It is the SSP checklist requirement for a Certificate of Acceptance issued by "the learning institution accredited by the Bureau of Immigration to accept foreign students", plus a copy of the school representative's BI accreditation ID. A culinary school that is not BI-accredited cannot file for you, whatever its cooking is like. Ask that question first. Our Special Study Permit guide covers the process in detail.

For a full bachelor's degree at an accredited higher education institution, the 9(f) student visa is the usual route instead. The same split shows up in other short-course sectors: flight schools run on the SSP too, and the NBI clearance line in the checklist is written specifically for them, as we cover in pilot training in the Philippines for foreign students.

Language of instruction

Be careful here, because the easy claim is slightly wrong. There is no blanket rule we could verify that makes English the sole medium of instruction in Philippine higher education. CMO 62 frames it as a graduate outcome — students should "Effectively communicate orally and in writing using English, Filipino, mother tongue language, and an appropriate Foreign Language required by the industry" — which is a competency requirement, not a policy that all classes are conducted in English.

In practice, at the schools covered here, degree instruction is in English, and hospitality programmes often add a second language because the industry demands it: Benilde's Vatel programme expects proficiency in English and French. If your English is the constraint, the practical answer is to fix it first; the Philippines has a large ESL sector aimed at exactly that, which we cover in learning English at Philippine ESL schools.

Where the schools are

The culinary and hospitality schools in this article cluster in Metro Manila, with Cebu as the clear second centre — ISCAHM runs professional culinary and fundamentals courses there, and the city's hotel and resort sector is where a lot of practicum hours get logged. If you are weighing location, our Cebu City schools directory is a starting point, and if you are choosing between fields entirely, the sibling guide to BS IT and Computer Science for foreign students covers the other large draw for international applicants.

Sources

• CHED Memorandum Order No. 62, series of 2017, PSG for BSTM and BSHM
• TESDA Training Regulations, Cookery NC II
• TESDA Training Regulations, Bread and Pastry Production NC II
• TESDA Training Regulations, Food and Beverage Services NC II
• TESDA Training Regulations, Housekeeping NC II
• TESDA Training Regulations, Bartending NC II
• De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Tuition Table of Payment for Undergraduate Programs AY 2025-2026
• Benilde, BS International Hospitality Management (Vatel Programme)
• Enderun Colleges, Tuition and Fees
• Enderun Colleges, Internships
• ISCAHM, Course Schedule
• Bureau of Immigration, Special Study Permit
• Bureau of Immigration, Special Study Permit checklist (BI Form P-001-Rev 2)
• Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Reference Exchange Rate Bulletin, 20 August 2026