Ranked #16 in popularity, health sciences & services is one of the most sought-after associate degree programs in the nation. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
College Factual reviewed 32 schools in California to determine which ones were the best for associate degree seekers in the field of health sciences & services. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 4,204 associate degrees in health sciences & services during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Health Sciences & Services School for Your Associate Degree
The health science associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality health science 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 take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of various 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 health sciences & services students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of health sciences & services students who choose to seek a associate degree at the school.
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 much debt health sciences & services 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 health sciences & services related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for health sciences & services students working on their associate degree.
More Ways to Rank Health Sciences & Services Schools
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Health Sciences & Services Associate Degree Schools in California list to help you make the college decision.
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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.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).