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 reviewed 6 schools in the Southeast Region to determine which ones were the best for associate degree seekers in the field of computer science. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 570 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 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.
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 full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for computer science 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 Computer Science Associate Degree Schools in the Southeast Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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It is difficult to beat Northern Virginia Community College if you wish to pursue an associate degree in computer science. Northern Virginia Community College is a very large public college located in the suburb of Annandale.
Computer Science associate degree recipients from Northern Virginia Community College earn a boost of about $10,060 above the average earnings of computer science graduates.
Located in the midsize city of LIttle Rock, Grantham University is a public university with a small student population.
Associate recipients from the computer science degree program at Grantham University make $9,075 more than the typical college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
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).