Ophthalmic & Optometric Support Services is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #115 most popular associate degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 3 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Ophthalmic & Optometric Support Services Associate Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 54 associate degrees in ophthalmic & optometric support services during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Ophthalmic & Optometric Support Services School for Your Associate Degree
The optometric support associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality optometric support 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 account for this 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 ophthalmic & optometric support services students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other ophthalmic & optometric support services 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 much debt ophthalmic & optometric support 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 ophthalmic & optometric support services related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for ophthalmic & optometric support services students working on their associate degree.
More Ways to Rank Ophthalmic & Optometric Support 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 Ophthalmic & Optometric Support Services Associate Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Essex County College is one of the best schools in the United States for getting an associate degree in ophthalmic & optometric support services. Essex is a medium-sized public college located in the large city of Newark.
Ophthalmic & Optometric Support Services associate degree recipients from Essex County College receive an earnings boost of around $6,516 above the average income of ophthalmic & optometric support services graduates.
Any student pursuing a degree in an associate degree in ophthalmic & optometric support services needs to take a look at New York City College of Technology. City Tech is a fairly large public college located in the city of Brooklyn.
Students who graduate with their associate from the optometric support program report average early career wages of $29,187.
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.