Liberal Arts is of the hottest associate degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #1 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.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 645 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for liberal arts students pursuing a associate degree. Combined, these schools handed out 230,036 associate degrees in liberal arts to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Liberal Arts School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of liberal arts 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
The overall quality of a associate degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to liberal arts students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other liberal arts students want to attend this school to pursue a associate degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized liberal arts related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for liberal arts 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 Liberal Arts Associate Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Best Schools for Associate Students to Study Liberal Arts in the United States
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing an associate degree in liberal arts. 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 Liberal Studies
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Remaining Award Winners
This section shows the remainder of the colleges awarded a Best Liberal Arts Associate Degree Schools badge.
Showing in this list means the college was ranked in the top 20% of the 645 different United States liberal arts 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 Liberal Arts 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.