2025 Best General Studies Associate Degree Schools
379Colleges in the United States
90,202Associate Degrees
General Studies is of the hottest associate degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #2 most popular major in the country. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 379 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best General Studies Associate Degree Schools ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 90,202 associate degrees in general studies to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great General Studies School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of general studies for getting your associate degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. 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 take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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 general studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other general studies 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.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized general studies related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for general studies students working on their associate degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best General Studies Associate Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Best Schools for Associate Students to Study General Studies in the United States
Explore the top ranked colleges and universities for general studies students seeking a an associate degree. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
25 Top Schools for an Associate in General Studies
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Additional Award Winners
This list represents the rest of the schools awarded a Best General Studies Associate Degree Schools badge.
Showing in this list means the college was ranked in the top 20% of the 379 different United States general studies schools we analyzed.
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best General Studies Associate Degree Schools award.
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.