Physical Sciences isn't the most popular associate program in the world, but it's not the least popular either. To be more precise it ranks #19 in popularity out of 38 majors in the country. So, you may have to do some digging around to find quality schools that offer the degree program. This list can help with that.
In 2024, College Factual analyzed 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Physical Sciences Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,109 associate degrees in physical sciences during the 2020-2021 academic year.
Choosing a Great Physical Sciences School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of physical sciences 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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 include 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.
Average Early-Career Salaries
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their associate degree from the school. After all, your associate degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 physical sciences students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other physical sciences 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.
Student Debt - How easy is it for physical sciences to pay back their student loans after receiving their associate degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized physical sciences related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for physical sciences 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 Physical Sciences Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Featured Physical Sciences Programs
Learn about start dates, transferring credits, availability of financial aid, and more by contacting the universities below.
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).