an associate degree in education is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #12 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 reviewed 32 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for associate degree seekers in the field of education. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 4,273 associate degrees in education during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Education School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of education for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality education program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of various 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 education students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of education students who choose to seek a associate degree at the school.
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 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 education related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for 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 Education Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
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).