2025 Best Liberal Arts Associate Degree Schools in North Carolina
50Colleges in North Carolina
14,554Associate Degrees
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.
College Factual looked at 50 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Liberal Arts Associate Degree Schools in North Carolina ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 14,554 associate degrees in liberal arts during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Liberal Arts School for Your Associate Degree
The liberal studies associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality liberal studies 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 take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of various 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 liberal arts students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of liberal arts 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.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized liberal arts related body.
Our full 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.
The liberal studies school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Liberal Arts Associate Degree Schools in North Carolina.
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Best Schools for Associate Students to Study Liberal Arts in North Carolina
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.
10 Top North Carolina Schools for an Associate in Liberal Studies
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Honorable Mentions
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 in North Carolina 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.