Ranked #3 in popularity, business, management & marketing 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.
College Factual looked at 46 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Business, Management & Marketing Associate Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 23,058 associate degrees in business, management & marketing during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Choosing a Great Business, Management & Marketing School for Your Associate Degree
The business, management & marketing associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality business, management & marketing 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 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 much a school focuses on business, management & marketing students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of business, management & marketing 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 business, management & marketing 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 business, management & marketing related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for business, management & marketing students working on their associate degree.
More Ways to Rank Business, Management & Marketing Schools
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Business, Management & Marketing Associate Degree Schools in California list, to help you choose the best school for you.
Best Schools for Associate Students to Study Business, Management & Marketing in California
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing an associate degree in business, management & marketing.
10 Top California Schools for an Associate in Business, Management & Marketing
Learn creative problem-solving skills and expand your knowledge in consumer behavior with an online associate in marketing degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
Here are some additional great schools for Business, Management & Marketing students in the state of California that almost earned our Best Business, Management & Marketing Associate Degree Schools in California award.
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).