If you plan on getting your associate degree in social sciences, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #7 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.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 32 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for social sciences students pursuing a associate degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 22,137 associate degrees in social sciences during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Social Sciences School for Your Associate Degree
The social sciences associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. 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 consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of different 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 social sciences students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of social sciences 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 much debt social sciences 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 social sciences related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for social sciences students working on their associate degree.
The social sciences 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 Social Sciences Associate Degree Schools.
Any student who is interested in an associate degree in social sciences needs to look into Yuba College. Located in the medium-sized suburb of Marysville, Yuba College is a public college with a moderately-sized student population.More information about a associate in social sciences from Yuba College
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).