Liberal Arts / Sciences & Humanities is of the hottest associate degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #1 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 2 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Liberal Arts / Sciences & Humanities Associate Degree Schools in South Dakota ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 151 associate degrees in liberal arts / sciences & humanities during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Liberal Arts & Humanities Bachelors Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" ACCEPTED (relevance 1)
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DEBUG: ✓ Offer "AA in Liberal Arts" ACCEPTED (relevance 1)
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DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 2 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.5
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Average Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of associate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their associate degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on liberal arts / sciences & humanities students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of liberal arts / sciences & humanities students who choose to seek a associate degree at the school.
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.
Student Debt - How much debt liberal arts / sciences & humanities students go into to obtain their associate degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized liberal arts / sciences & humanities related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for liberal arts / sciences & humanities students working on their associate degree.
The liberal arts / sciences & humanities 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 / Sciences & Humanities Associate Degree Schools in South Dakota.
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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
