If you pursue a associate degree in design & applied arts, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #19 most popular program in the country. 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 6 schools in Minnesota to determine which ones were the best for design & applied arts students pursuing a associate degree. Combined, these schools handed out 184 associate degrees in design & applied arts to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Design & Applied Arts School for Your Associate Degree
The design associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality design 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 take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host 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 many resources a school devotes to design & applied arts students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of design & applied arts 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 design & applied arts 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 design & applied arts related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for design & applied arts 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 Design & Applied Arts Associate Degree Schools in Minnesota list to help you make the college decision.
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Minneapolis Community and Technical College is one of the best schools in the country for getting an associate degree in design & applied arts. Located in the large city of Minneapolis, Minneapolis Community and Technical College is a public college with a medium-sized student population.
Associate recipients from the design & applied arts major at Minneapolis Community and Technical College earn $4,191 more than the standard graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
Any student who is interested in an associate degree in design & applied arts has to look into Alexandria Technical & Community College. ATCC is a small public college located in the remote town of Alexandria.
Soon after graduating, design associate recipients typically make about $31,830 at the beginning of their careers.
Century College is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting an associate degree in design & applied arts. Century College is a moderately-sized public college located in the large suburb of White Bear Lake.
Those design & applied arts students who get their associate degree from Century College receive $3,811 more than the typical design graduate.
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.
The design associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality design program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
