If you're seeking an Associate Degree in legal professions, you will have fewer peers than average since the major degree program is the #23 one in the country in terms of popularity.This may make is a little harder to find a school that is a good fit for you.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 7 schools in the Plains States Region 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 221 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. 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 school'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 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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools 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 the Plains States Region 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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
