Education is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #12 most popular associate degree program in the country. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 6 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Education Associate Degree Schools in Missouri ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 489 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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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 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.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Education Associate Degree Schools in Missouri list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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
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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
