2025 Best Registered Nursing Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region
96Colleges in the Southwest Region
10,081Associate Degrees
Registered Nursing is of the hottest associate degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #3 most popular major in the country. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 96 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Registered Nursing Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 10,081 associate degrees in registered nursing to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Registered Nursing School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of registered nursing for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality registered nursing program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a associate degree school is important to ensure a good 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.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on registered nursing students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other registered nursing students want to attend this school to pursue a associate degree.
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.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized registered nursing related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for registered nursing 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 Registered Nursing Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
Best Schools for Associate Students to Study Registered Nursing in the Southwest Region
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing an associate degree in registered nursing. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
19 Top Southwest Region Schools for an Associate in Registered Nursing
Rest of the Top Best Registered Nursing Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region
Additional Noteworthy Schools
Here are some additional great schools for Registered Nursing students in the Southwest Region that almost earned our Best Registered Nursing Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region 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).