2025 Best Dental Hygiene/Hygienist Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region
31Colleges in the Southwest Region
668Associate Degrees
If you pursue a associate degree in dental hygiene/hygienist, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #24 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 31 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for dental hygiene/hygienist students pursuing a associate degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 668 associate degrees in dental hygiene/hygienist during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Dental Hygiene/Hygienist School for Your Associate Degree
The dental hygiene associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality dental hygiene 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 various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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 dental hygiene/hygienist students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other dental hygiene/hygienist 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.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized dental hygiene/hygienist related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for dental hygiene/hygienist 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 Dental Hygiene/Hygienist Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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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.