If you pursue a associate degree in health sciences & services, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #16 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 17 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Health Sciences & Services Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,280 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. 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 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.
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 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 colleges for health sciences & services students working on their associate degree.
More Ways to Rank Health Sciences & Services Schools
The health science 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 Health Sciences & Services Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region.
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Central New Mexico Community College is one of the finest schools in the country for getting an associate degree in health sciences & services. CNM is a fairly large public college located in the large city of Albuquerque.
Associate students who receive their degree from the health science program make about $28,933 in their early career salary.
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 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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
