Horticulture is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #87 most popular associate degree program in the country. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 13 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Horticulture Associate Degree Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,211 associate degrees in horticulture during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Horticulture School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of horticulture for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality horticulture program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to horticulture students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other horticulture 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 much debt horticulture 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 horticulture related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for horticulture 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 Horticulture Associate Degree Schools ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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It is difficult to beat North Carolina State University if you wish to pursue an associate degree in horticulture. Located in the city of Raleigh, NC State is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Horticulture associate degree recipients from North Carolina State University earn a boost of around $2,885 over the typical income of horticulture graduates.
Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting an associate degree in horticulture. Located in the town of Wooster, Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute is a public university with a small student population.
Students who graduate with their associate from the horticulture program state that they receive average early career wages of $34,190.
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).