General Engineering is of the hottest associate degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #29 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for general engineering students pursuing a associate degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 642 associate degrees in general engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great General Engineering School for Your Associate Degree
The engineering associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on general engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other general engineering students want to attend this school to pursue a associate degree.
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.
Student Debt - How much debt general engineering 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 engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for general engineering 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 General Engineering Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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It's hard to beat Austin Community College District if you wish to pursue an associate degree in general engineering. Austin Community College District is a fairly large public college located in the city of Austin.
After graduating, engineering associate recipients usually earn an average of $43,183 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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
The engineering associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
