If you plan on getting your associate degree in fire protection, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #36 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 11 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Fire Protection Associate Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 517 associate degrees in fire protection to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Fire Protection School for Your Associate Degree
The fire protection associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality fire protection 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 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.
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 fire protection students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of fire protection 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 fire protection to pay back their student loans after receiving their associate degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized fire protection related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for fire protection students working on their associate degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Fire Protection Associate Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Purdue University Global is a very large public university located in the city of West Lafayette.
Associate recipients from the fire protection degree program at Purdue University Global make $5,954 more than the typical college graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
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.