Engineering is about average in terms of popularity for associate degrees programs. That is, it ranks #20 out of the 38 majors across the country that we analyze each year. As such, the degree program isn't offered at every college in the United States, but there are schools that do have a program in the field that are top-notch when it comes to quality.
College Factual looked at 3 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Engineering Associate Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 668 associate degrees in engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Engineering School for Your Associate Degree
The engineering associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality engineering 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 collection of different 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 many resources a school devotes to engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other engineering 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 easy is it for engineering to pay back their student loans after receiving their associate degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized engineering related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for engineering students working on their associate degree.
The engineering school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Engineering Associate Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region.
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. Important measures of a quality engineering program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
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