an associate degree in social work is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #66 out of 328 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 5 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Social Work Associate Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 576 associate degrees in social work during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Social Work School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of social work for getting your associate degree school matters. 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
The overall quality of a associate degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to social work students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of social work 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 easy is it for social work to pay back their student loans after receiving their associate degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized social work related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for social work students working on their associate degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Social Work Associate Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Every student who is interested in an associate degree in social work needs to take a look at Sinclair Community College. Located in the midsize city of Dayton, Sinclair Community College is a public college with a fairly large student population.More information about a associate in social work from Sinclair Community College
Any student who is interested in an associate degree in social work needs to take a look at Clark State Community College. Clark State Community College is a small public college located in the small city of Springfield.
After graduation, social work associate recipients usually make an average of $29,981 in their early careers.
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
Your choice of social work for getting your associate degree school matters. 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.
