If you plan on getting your associate degree in general education, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #55 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for general education students pursuing a associate degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 175 associate degrees in general education during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great General Education School for Your Associate Degree
The education associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality education program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 collection 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 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 full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools 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 Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Every student pursuing a degree in an associate degree in general education needs to take a look at Connors State College. Located in the rural area of Warner, CSC is a public college with a small student population.
General Education associate degree recipients from Connors State College receive an earnings boost of approximately $2,194 above the typical income of general education graduates.
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
The education associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality education program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
