When it comes to popularity, an associate degree in engineering sits in the middle of the road, ranking #20 out of 38 majors in the country. So, it might take a little more work to find colleges and universities that offer the degree program.
College Factual looked at 12 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Engineering Associate Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 1,206 associate degrees in engineering to qualified students.
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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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their associate degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their associate degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for 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 Engineering Associate Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that 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).
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
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