an associate degree in computer & information sciences is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #5 out of 38 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual looked at 24 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Computer & Information Sciences Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 4,724 associate degrees in computer & information sciences during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Computer & Information Sciences School for Your Associate Degree
The computer & information sciences associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. 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 include a college'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.
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 much a school focuses on computer & information sciences students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other computer & information sciences 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 easy is it for computer & information sciences to pay back their student loans after receiving their associate degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized computer & information sciences related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for computer & information sciences students working on their associate degree.
More Ways to Rank Computer & Information Sciences Schools
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Computer & Information Sciences Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest 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 computer & information sciences associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
