Ranked #18 in popularity, sociology is one of the most sought-after associate degree programs in the nation. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 22 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for sociology students pursuing a associate degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 5,109 associate degrees in sociology during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Sociology School for Your Associate Degree
The sociology associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality sociology 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 combination of different 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 sociology students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other sociology students want to attend this school to pursue a associate degree.
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 sociology related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for sociology 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 Sociology Associate Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
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One of 3 majors within the Sociology area of study, Sociology has other similar majors worth exploring.
ADBLOCK #115
Notes and References
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
The sociology associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality sociology program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
