2025 Best Early Childhood Education Associate Degree Schools
91Colleges in the United States
6,823Associate Degrees
If you pursue a associate degree in early childhood education, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #16 most popular program in the country. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 91 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for early childhood education students pursuing a associate degree. Combined, these schools handed out 6,823 associate degrees in early childhood education to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Early Childhood Education School for Your Associate Degree
The child development associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality child development 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
The overall quality of a associate degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to early childhood education students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of early childhood education students who choose to seek a associate degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized early childhood education related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for early childhood education students working on their associate degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Early Childhood Education Associate Degree Schools ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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ADBLOCK #171
Best Schools for Associate Students to Study Early Childhood Education in the United States
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing an associate degree in early childhood education. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
18 Top Schools for an Associate in Child development
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Additional Noteworthy Schools
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Early Childhood Education Associate Degree Schools award.
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).