General Education is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #55 most popular associate degree program in the country. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
College Factual looked at 2 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best General Education Associate Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 239 associate degrees in general education during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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 general education students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other general education 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 general education 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 general education related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for general education 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 General Education Associate Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Ivy Tech Community College is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting an associate degree in general education. Ivy Tech Community College is a fairly large public college located in the city of Indianapolis.
After graduating, education associate recipients generally make an average of $26,848 in the first five years of their career.
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).
