Legal Professionsassociate programs are on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of popularity. In fact, the major degree program ranks #23 out of the 38 majors we look at each year. While this may limit the number of schools that offer the degree program, there are still top-quality ones to be found.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 5 schools in Illinois to determine which ones were the best for legal professions students pursuing a associate degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 145 associate degrees in legal professions during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Legal Professions School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of legal professions for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality legal professions program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 school'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.
Average Early-Career Salaries
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their associate degree from the school. After all, your associate degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on legal professions students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of legal professions 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 easy is it for legal professions to pay back their student loans after receiving their associate degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized legal professions related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for legal professions 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 Legal Professions Associate Degree Schools in Illinois ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that 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).