an associate degree in computer science is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #35 out of 328 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 13 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Computer Science Associate Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 798 associate degrees in computer science during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Computer Science School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of computer science for getting your associate degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their associate degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their associate degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 computer science students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other computer science 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 computer science 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 computer science related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for computer science students working on their associate degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Computer Science Associate Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Every student who is interested in an associate degree in computer science needs to look into LaGuardia Community College. LaGuardia is a fairly large public college located in the large city of Long Island City.
Associate graduates who receive their degree from the compsci program earn around $24,888 in their early career salary.
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).