an associate degree in agriculture & agriculture operations is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #13 out of 38 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 13 schools in the Great Lakes Region to determine which ones were the best for agriculture & agriculture operations students pursuing a associate degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,817 associate degrees in agriculture & agriculture operations during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Agriculture & Agriculture Operations School for Your Associate Degree
The agriculture & agriculture operations associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality agriculture & agriculture operations program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 college'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 Early-Career Salaries
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their associate degree from the school. After all, your associate degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 agriculture & agriculture operations students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other agriculture & agriculture operations 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 agriculture & agriculture operations 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 agriculture & agriculture operations related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for agriculture & agriculture operations 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 Agriculture & Agriculture Operations Associate Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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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).
The agriculture & agriculture operations associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality agriculture & agriculture operations program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
