The real payoff gap between every Degree level

Associate, bachelor's, master's, or PhD: New 2025 BLS data shows exactly what each degree level actually pays

27 min read

This guide is for high school graduates weighing their first credential, working adults considering a return to school, parents evaluating cost against payoff, and international students trying to match a foreign qualification against the US system. Use it before you apply, not after you have already paid a deposit.

This guide walks through all four degree levels in order, plus the professional degrees and short-term credentials people often confuse with them. It covers how long each one takes, what a 2-year college degree and a 4-year college degree actually train a person to do, where the standard advice breaks down, and what current wage and employment data says about pay at each level. If you are choosing between an associate degree, a bachelor's degree, or skipping the credential path altogether, the details below should settle most of the open questions.

College degree levels in order

Here is the short version before the details.

Degree level	Typical length	Typical credits	Common types
Associate	2 years	60	AA, AS, AAS
Bachelor's	4 years	120	BA, BS, BFA
Master's	1 to 2 years after a bachelor's	30 to 60	MA, MS, MBA, M.Ed.
Doctoral	3 to 8 years after a bachelor's	Varies by program	PhD, EdD, MD, JD

An associate's degree is a 2-year college degree. A bachelor's degree is a 4-year college degree. Everything beyond that falls under graduate school, which splits into master's and doctoral programs. Some fields also offer professional degrees, like law and medicine, that follow their own separate timelines.

College degree levels stack on top of each other in most fields. Students generally need the level below before starting the level above. A few community college bachelor's programs are changing that a little, and a few accelerated programs let strong students combine a bachelor's and a master's, but the basic ladder still holds for the vast majority of students.

The associate degree is a 2-year path into the workforce

An associate degree sits above a high school diploma and below a bachelor's degree. Most programs run about 60 credit hours, spread across two years of full-time study at roughly 15 credit hours per semester, according to the University of Phoenix. Part-time students often take longer, and that does not change the credential a student ends up with.

Three types show up most often.

• Associate of Arts (AA): leans toward humanities, communication, and social science courses.
• Associate of Science (AS): leans toward math, biology, and lab-based subjects.
• Associate of Applied Science (AAS): trains students for a specific job right after graduation, in fields like dental hygiene, HVAC repair, paralegal work, or radiologic technology.

Students choose an associate degree for two different reasons. Some want to start working fast, in a field where a 2-year credential is enough to get hired. A dental hygienist, an HVAC technician, and a paralegal can all start their careers with an AAS and never need a bachelor's degree at all. Others use the AA or AS as the first half of a bachelor's degree, then transfer the credits to a four-year school. Community colleges built entire transfer systems around this second path, and many have articulation agreements with state universities that guarantee credits carry over instead of getting rejected on arrival.

So what degree can a student earn at a 2-year community college? The AA, AS, and AAS are the core credentials, and they are what most students walk away with. A growing number of community colleges now also award bachelor's degrees, which changes the math for students who do not want to transfer anywhere at all.

Can you get a bachelor's degree at a community college?

Yes. As of 2024, 24 states allow at least some of their community colleges to award bachelor's degrees, according to Forbes Advisor and the Community College Baccalaureate Association. West Virginia went first, back in 1989, and the list has grown steadily since, with more than 200 community colleges nationwide now conferring at least one bachelor's degree, according to a Columbia University Community College Research Center fact sheet. Arizona signed on in 2021, and states including Colorado, Texas, Washington, and Florida have all expanded their community college systems to include four-year degrees, per BestColleges.

These programs usually target specific workforce gaps rather than trying to replace a university education across the board. Nursing, cybersecurity, respiratory therapy, and applied technology fields show up again and again, because local employers need bachelor 's-level workers and the nearest university does not offer a matching program in that town. In Arizona, Maricopa Community College looked at adding a respiratory therapy bachelor's degree specifically because state hospitals started requiring a four-year credential for the role, and no in-state university offered the training. Texas and California cap how many bachelor's programs their community colleges can run and require proof of student or employer demand before approving a new one, and in early 2026 California's community college system approved new bachelor's programs in cyberdefense and physical therapy despite objections from the California State University system, according to EdSource.

The push has not gone unchallenged. Four-year universities in several states have raised concerns about competition for a shrinking pool of college-age students, a trend enrollment offices call the demographic cliff, according to OPB. In California, a dispute between community colleges and the California State University system over overlapping program offerings needed an outside mediator to sort out. Illinois has a similar proposal on the table, one of several statehouse debates in 2026 over whether community colleges should be allowed to compete directly with regional universities.

The students who actually enroll in these programs tend to be older than a typical freshman, often in their late 20s or early 30s, working full-time, and raising a family at the same time. Many already have an associate degree, started a career, and realized partway through that a bachelor's degree was the missing piece for a promotion. Transferring across town to a university with a different schedule and a different price tag is not always realistic once a job and kids are in the picture. A community college bachelor's degree solves that specific problem for a specific kind of student. It is not built to replace the traditional four-year path for an 18-year-old moving into a dorm.

Anyone weighing this route should check two things before enrolling. First, confirm the specific program holds accreditation, not just the college as a whole. Second, ask whether local employers actually recognize a community college bachelor's degree the same way they recognize one from a traditional university. Most do, but it pays to check for a specific field before committing two or four years to it.

Where transfer credit actually breaks down

Almost every guide to college degree levels mentions transfer credit in a single sentence and moves on. That sentence hides a distinction that trips up a large number of students every year, and it explains why a student can hear "yes, your credits will transfer" and still lose a semester's worth of work.

A credit transferred to a school is not the same thing as a credit transferring into a major. A university might accept a C-minus in an introductory biology course as three elective credits while refusing to count it toward a nursing program's science prerequisite, because the nursing department sets its own minimum grade separately from the registrar's general transfer policy. Students who assume "transferred" means "counted toward my degree requirements" frequently discover the gap only after registering for a class they thought they had already completed.

• Grade cutoffs rarely get advertised up front. Many universities will not accept a transfer credit below a C, even if the sending school passed the course at a D.
• Credit caps are common. Most bachelor's programs cap transfer credit at 60 to 90 credits, meaning a student who arrives with 75 community college credits can still lose credits at the door if the receiving school's cap sits lower.
• An articulation agreement guarantees course-to-course equivalency in writing. Without one, transfer credit approval is discretionary and can vary by advisor, department, and even by semester.
• Reverse transfer exists for students who leave a four-year school before finishing. Credits can sometimes be sent back to a community college and retroactively earn a student an associate degree they never formally applied for.

The bachelor's degree is still the hinge point of the system

A bachelor's degree is what most people picture when they hear "college degree." It is the answer to what degree is 4 years of college, and it is also the answer to what degree a student gets after 4 years of college, assuming full-time study without repeated major changes.

A standard bachelor's program runs about 120 credit hours. That breaks into general education courses such as English composition, math, history, and a lab science, plus a major and often electives or a minor. Three main types cover most students.

• Bachelor of Arts (BA): built around communication, writing, languages, and social sciences.
• Bachelor of Science (BS): built around math, lab work, and technical subjects like engineering or computer science.
• Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA): built around visual art, music, theater, or other performance-based training, with heavy studio or rehearsal hours on top of standard coursework.

A bachelor's degree is the standard minimum requirement for a wide range of professional jobs, including teaching, accounting, marketing, nursing, engineering, and most corporate office roles. Demand at the engineering end of that list is not slowing down either. As chipmakers race to keep up with AI hardware demand, our coverage of the hidden HBM memory bottleneck driving the AI chip war shows how tightly semiconductor engineering roles are now tied to bachelor's and graduate-level electrical engineering training, not general computer literacy.

A bachelor's degree also acts as the entry ticket for graduate school. Almost no master's or doctoral program will admit a student without one, which makes the bachelor's degree the hinge point of the whole system. Skip it, and most of the higher levels stay closed, regardless of talent.

Four years is the textbook timeline, but it is not the real average. National completion data has shown for years that many students take five or six years to finish, because of switched majors, part-time schedules, work obligations, or a semester abroad that did not line up with degree requirements. None of that changes the degree a student walks away with. It changes only how long the walk takes and how much it costs along the way, since extra semesters mean extra tuition bills.

One quirk worth knowing: a BA and a BS in the same subject are not always identical. A university might offer a BA in psychology with more elective flexibility and a BS in psychology with a heavier statistics and lab requirement. Anyone choosing between the two should read the actual course list, not just the name of the degree.

The master's degree

A master's degree comes after a bachelor's and usually takes one to two years of full-time study, built around 30 to 60 credit hours depending on the field. Where a bachelor's degree gives broad exposure to a subject, a master's degree narrows the focus and goes deeper into one slice of it.

Common types include the Master of Arts (MA), Master of Science (MS), Master of Business Administration (MBA), Master of Education (M.Ed.), Master of Public Health (MPH), and Master of Social Work (MSW). Each one maps to a specific field, and admission usually requires a bachelor's degree in that field or a closely related one. Some programs, like the MSW and MPH, add a fieldwork requirement, so students spend part of the program working in a real clinic, school, or agency instead of sitting only in a classroom. The stakes behind that MPH fieldwork requirement are not abstract. Our reporting on how Europe's 2026 heatwave death rates varied sharply by country shows exactly the kind of population-level health data that public health graduate programs train students to analyze and act on.

Some careers will not open up without a master's degree. Licensed clinical therapists, school counselors, and many public health leadership roles all require one at a minimum. Other careers treat a master's as optional, useful for a raise or a promotion, valuable for switching specialties, but not a legal requirement to practice. An MBA falls into this second group for most business roles. It can speed up a career, but very few employers list it as a hard requirement, the way a state licensing board lists a master's degree as a requirement for a therapist.

Cost matters here more than at any other level, because a master's degree rarely comes with the same scholarship and grant support that undergraduate programs offer. Anyone considering one should ask early whether the target career actually pays more with a master's degree attached, and by how much, before signing up for a second round of tuition.

The highest degree in college is the doctorate

So what is the highest degree in college? The doctorate. It sits at the top of the standard degree ladder and represents the deepest level of formal study a person can complete in a subject.

A doctoral program takes anywhere from three to eight years past a bachelor's degree, depending on the field, the program's structure, and whether the student studies full-time, according to TheBestSchools.org. A PhD, Doctor of Philosophy, is the most common research-focused version, and it usually ends with a dissertation, an original piece of research the student writes and defends in front of a faculty committee. The word "philosophy" in the title is a leftover from an older academic tradition and does not mean the degree is actually about philosophy. A PhD in chemistry, biology, or economics is still a PhD.

Other doctoral degrees exist for practice-based fields rather than research. An EdD suits education leaders who want a doctorate focused on running schools and districts rather than publishing academic papers. A DBA suits business executives who want doctoral-level credentials without switching into a research career. Once a student finishes a doctorate and defends the dissertation, they earn the title of doctor in that field, separate from the medical use of the word most people think of first.

One wrinkle worth knowing: not every field treats a doctorate as the ceiling. Some fields, like social work or fine arts, treat a master's degree as the terminal degree, meaning it is the highest credential most professionals in that field ever need or pursue. The doctorate is the highest college degree overall, but it is not always the highest degree in a specific career path. Anyone weighing this should check the terminal degree for their target field before assuming a PhD is required.

Inside a funded PhD, what the stipend actually buys

This section assumes a reader already understands what a PhD is and wants the part almost no basic guide covers: how doctoral funding actually works, and where the advertised deal quietly diverges from the real one.

Most PhD programs offer one of three funding types, and the type a student gets changes both the workload and the realistic time to degree.

• Teaching assistantship (TA): the student teaches or grades for undergraduate courses, often two courses a semester, in exchange for a tuition waiver and a stipend. Heavy teaching loads routinely extend the time to degree because research time gets squeezed into evenings and breaks.
• Research assistantship (RA): the student works on a faculty member's funded research project, usually tied to a specific grant. This is the dominant funding model in STEM fields, where lab funding largely determines whether a program can admit a student at all.
• Fellowship: the student receives a stipend with no teaching or research service attached, usually for one to three years at the start of a program, funded by the university or an external body like the National Science Foundation.

A "funded" PhD is not a free PhD. Tuition is waived, but the stipend is a wage paid for work performed, whether that work is teaching or research, and it is rarely close to market pay for someone with a bachelor's or master's degree in the same field. Stipends commonly run in the mid five figures a year, which sounds reasonable until it is measured against the salary a graduate could be earning instead over the same four to eight years.

The gap between advertised funding and actual time to degree is where a meaningful share of doctoral students get blindsided. Most programs guarantee funding for four or five years, while the median time to degree in many humanities and social science fields runs six to seven years. Students who finish coursework and exams but stall on the dissertation, a stage informally called ABD, all but dissertation, can find themselves without guaranteed funding for the final stretch of the degree they need most to finish. STEM PhDs are close to universally funded through research assistantships tied to a lab's grant money, which is one reason STEM programs tend to report shorter average completion times than humanities programs.

Funding pressure in AI-adjacent PhD programs has become its own story recently, as universities compete with private labs for the same talent pool. Anthropic's own rollout and temporary pause of its Claude Fable 5 and Mythos models is one example of how quickly the frontier of AI research funding and hiring can shift, which matters directly to computer science doctoral candidates whose research assistantships often depend on exactly this kind of industry-adjacent grant funding.

Professional degrees, the exceptions to the ladder

Two degrees break the neat associate-bachelor's-master's-doctoral ladder: the Juris Doctor (JD) for lawyers and the Doctor of Medicine (MD) for physicians. Both require a bachelor's degree first, then a separate multi-year professional program, and both carry the title "doctor," even though the training is built for practice rather than academic research.

A JD typically takes three years after a bachelor's degree, followed by a bar exam in whichever state a graduate wants to practice law. An MD typically takes four years after a bachelor's degree, followed by a residency that adds three to seven more years before a doctor practices independently, depending on the specialty. Neither degree requires a master's degree as a stepping stone. Students go straight from a bachelor's degree into the professional program, which surprises people who assume every doctor and lawyer collected a master's degree somewhere along the way.

Pharmacy (PharmD), dentistry (DDS or DMD), and veterinary medicine (DVM) follow a similar pattern: bachelor's degree, then a focused professional doctorate, then licensing exams before a graduate can practice on real patients or clients. These fields sit at the doctoral level in name, but they function more like advanced trade training than academic research, which is exactly the point.

What a foreign degree means to a US employer

Most degree-level guides are written as though every reader moved through the US system starting at age 18. A large share of the people researching degree levels are immigrants, international students, or US employers trying to evaluate a foreign transcript, and that need usually goes unaddressed entirely.

A three-year bachelor's degree from the United Kingdom, India, or much of Europe under the Bologna system does not automatically equal a four-year US bachelor's degree for US employers or graduate schools. The mismatch is not a technicality. It is the reason a credential evaluation step exists at all, and skipping it is one of the most common and most avoidable mistakes an international applicant makes.

• Credential evaluation services, including WES and ECE, both approved through the National Association of Credential Evaluation Services, check coursework content, the sending institution's accreditation status, and credit-hour equivalency, not just the diploma's title.
• A degree can be evaluated as equivalent without granting a license. A foreign medical degree might be evaluated as equivalent to a US bachelor's degree plus an MD combined, but that evaluation does not grant a US medical license without separate board exams and, in most cases, a US residency.
• A common and costly employer mistake is rejecting a qualified candidate because internal hiring software flags "no bachelor's degree on file" when the candidate holds a formally evaluated equivalent degree that the system was never configured to recognize.
• Credential evaluation typically takes two to eight weeks and costs 100 to 300 dollars, and it is a separate step from any US graduate school application, not something bundled into it automatically.

Timing matters as much as paperwork here, particularly for students still enrolled on a student visa. Our coverage of a buried deadline rule affecting F-1 visa holders is a useful companion read for anyone evaluating a foreign degree while also managing visa status, since a missed visa deadline can undo months of credential planning regardless of how strong the academic case is.

College degree levels and salary: what the data shows

Money is not the only reason people choose a degree level, but it is a real one, and the numbers are public. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks median weekly earnings for full-time workers age 25 and over by education level every year through its Current Population Survey.

For 2025, the BLS reported these median weekly earnings for full-time workers 25 and older:

Education level	2025 median weekly earnings
High school graduate, no college	$966
Some college, no degree	$1,062
Associate degree	$1,135
Bachelor's degree only	$1,578
Master's degree	$1,876
Doctoral degree	$2,307
Professional degree	$2,294

Each degree level up the ladder adds real money to a paycheck, and the jump from a high school diploma to a bachelor's degree is the biggest single step in the data. Unemployment tells a similar story. In April 2026, the BLS reported a 2.8 percent unemployment rate for workers with a bachelor's degree or higher, versus 3.2 percent for workers with some college or an associate degree, 4.7 percent for high school graduates, and 6.4 percent for those without a high school diploma. Education does not just raise pay. It also lowers the odds of being out of work in the first place.

None of this means a bachelor's degree beats an associate degree for every person, and treating the salary table like a universal ranking misses the point. A 2-year electrician or dental hygienist program can lead to solid pay with a fraction of the tuition bill and two fewer years out of the workforce, and plenty of tradespeople out-earn entry-level bachelor's degree holders in their first several years on the job. The right degree level depends on the specific career target, not just the position on a salary chart. Anyone trying to run these numbers against their own tuition and loan situation before enrolling can get a useful starting framework from tools covered in our guide to the best ChatGPT prompts for personal finance in 2026, which walks through how to structure a real return-on-investment comparison instead of relying on national averages alone.

Why have some employers stopped asking for a degree at all

The salary and unemployment data above is real, but it describes the labor market as it existed when the survey was taken, not the direction the market is currently moving. A growing number of employers, public and private, have quietly removed the bachelor's degree requirement that used to sit at the top of nearly every job posting, and most degree-level guides have not caught up to it.

Maryland was the first state to eliminate bachelor's degree requirements for most government jobs, in March 2022, and hires without a degree rose 41 percent in the following months. Utah followed in December 2022, and Pennsylvania's governor removed the requirement from roughly 92 percent of the state's 65,000 government jobs shortly after taking office, according to reporting compiled by BestColleges. More than a dozen additional states, including Colorado, Virginia, Alaska, and North Carolina, have made similar moves since.

Private employers followed a similar path. Google, IBM, and Delta Air Lines, which dropped its bachelor's degree requirement for pilot applicants in 2022 amid an industry-wide pilot shortage, are among the large employers that have formally removed degree requirements from a meaningful share of job postings. The shift has expanded well beyond software roles into aviation, finance, and retail.

Here is the part that rarely makes it into a hiring headline. A Harvard Kennedy School analysis of firms that publicly dropped degree requirements found that the change was largely cosmetic at a large share of them. Roughly 45 percent of the firms studied removed the stated requirement from job postings with no meaningful change in who actually got hired, and about a fifth saw short-term gains in hiring candidates without degrees that did not hold up over time, according to the Harvard Kennedy School study. A smaller group of employers made the change stick, increasing their real hiring of non-degree candidates by close to 20 percent in the roles studied.

This matters for anyone deciding whether to skip or delay a degree based on a headline about a company dropping its requirement. The posting language and the actual hiring manager's behavior are two different things, and the gap between them is exactly where job seekers without a degree run into trouble. The practical move is to check whether a target employer has published data on actual non-degree hires in that role, not just a policy statement, before treating the requirement as genuinely optional. Fast-moving consumer ventures illustrate the same pattern from another angle. Even a high-velocity launch like the Trump Mobile T1 phone's rapid rollout and its reported $59 million in customer deposits shows how quickly consumer tech ventures can scale hiring around specific operational skills rather than academic pedigree, while still keeping degree requirements for regulated or highly technical roles behind the scenes.

What has not moved, and is not likely to, are fields tied to state licensure. Nursing, engineering, teaching, and law all keep their degree requirements in place because the requirement is a legal one, not a hiring preference, and no skills-based hiring trend changes a state licensing statute.

Certificates, diplomas, and other credentials that aren't degrees

Not every credential a person can earn after high school counts as a college degree, and mixing these up causes real confusion on job applications. A certificate program usually takes a few months to a year and focuses on one narrow skill, like medical billing, phlebotomy, or a specific software certification. It does not stack credits toward a degree the way an associate degree does.

A diploma program, common at trade and technical schools, runs longer than a certificate but shorter than an associate degree, often in fields like cosmetology or automotive repair. Neither a certificate nor a diploma carries the same weight as a degree on a job application that specifically asks for a degree, even if the actual skills taught overlap. If a job posting says an associate degree or higher is required, a certificate usually will not satisfy that line, even from an accredited school.

Accreditation, the detail that protects your degree

Accreditation is the part of the process that students skip past, right before it becomes the most important part of the process. It is an outside review that confirms a school, or a specific program within a school, meets a baseline standard for teaching and coursework. Skip this check, and a degree can turn out to be worthless for the two things that matter most: transferring credits and getting hired.

Regional accreditation is the standard most public and private nonprofit universities carry, and it is generally the version employers and other schools recognize without a second look. National accreditation covers many trade and career-focused schools and can be perfectly legitimate, but credits from a nationally accredited school do not always transfer into a regionally accredited university. Anyone enrolling anywhere should ask a straightforward question first: if these credits ever need to transfer, will the next school actually accept them? A five-minute phone call to the registrar's office at a target university answers this faster than any marketing page will.

Program-level accreditation matters even more in licensed fields. Nursing, engineering, teaching, and social work all have their own accrediting bodies separate from the general school accreditation. A nursing program can sit inside a fully accredited university and still fail to meet the specific accreditation a state board requires for licensure. Anyone checking this should confirm program-level accreditation directly with the licensing board in the state where they plan to work, not just the school's own claims about itself.

Degree-level assumptions that don't hold up

Standard advice about degree levels tends to repeat the same lines regardless of whether they still hold. A few of the most common ones are worth checking against current data before acting on them.

Common claim	What the data actually shows
A master's degree always raises your pay	It raises median pay across the labor force overall. In fields like software engineering, a strong portfolio and three years of experience often out-earn a master's holder with no experience.
A funded PhD costs nothing	Tuition is usually waived, but the stipend is below market wage for four to eight years, and that gap is a real opportunity cost against the salary a graduate could have earned instead.
Online degrees are viewed as lower quality by employers	For regionally accredited programs, most large employers no longer distinguish online from in-person on a resume. Smaller employers and some licensing boards still do, so it depends on the field.
An associate degree is a fallback credential	In fields like dental hygiene, air traffic control, and radiologic technology, an associate degree is the terminal credential and often out-earns entry-level bachelor's roles.
Four years means four years	National completion data has shown for years that the four-year timeline functions as a floor rather than an average once major changes and part-time schedules are factored in.
Dropping a degree requirement means the degree no longer matters for that employer	Harvard Kennedy School research found roughly 45 percent of firms that removed stated degree requirements showed no real change in actual hiring behavior afterward.

How to choose the right college degree level

Start with the job, not the diploma. Look up the actual job postings for the target career and check what degree level shows up as the minimum requirement. Job boards are more honest about this than college brochures, which tend to sell prestige rather than requirements.

A few questions are worth answering before committing time and tuition to any degree level.

• Does this career legally require a license, and does that license require a specific degree level?
• What is the total cost, including years out of the workforce, not just tuition and fees?
• Will credits transfer if plans change halfway through the program, and has the receiving school confirmed that in writing?
• Is the specific program accredited, not just the institution as a whole?

Nobody needs a doctorate to work in marketing, and nobody becomes a licensed therapist with only an associate degree. Matching the degree level to the actual career requirement first, then weighing campus, reputation, or program prestige second, is the fastest way to avoid overspending on college.

Full-time, part-time, and online, how format changes the timeline

Every timeline in this guide assumes full-time, in-person study, and real life rarely matches that assumption. A part-time student taking two classes a semester instead of four or five will stretch a 2-year associate degree closer to four years, and a 4-year bachelor's degree closer to seven or eight. The degree itself does not change. The pace does.

Online programs have made the associate and bachelor's levels far more workable for adults juggling a job or a family, and most regionally accredited universities now run online versions of their core degrees. A few checks still apply before enrolling in one. Confirm the online program carries the same accreditation as the in-person version, confirm any licensing board in the relevant state accepts an online degree for that specific career, and confirm lab or clinical requirements, if the field has them, get scheduled in person somewhere nearby. A nursing degree, for example, still needs hands-on clinical hours, no matter how many lectures happen on a screen.

Frequently asked questions

What degree is 4 years of college?

Four years of full-time college study lead to a bachelor's degree, such as a BA or BS.

What degree do you get after 4 years of college?

Assuming a student completes the required coursework, four years of college study result in a bachelor's degree.

What is the highest degree in college?

The doctorate is the highest college degree. It is also called a terminal degree in most academic fields, though a few fields treat a master's degree as terminal instead.

What degree can you earn at a 2-year community college?

Community colleges award associate degrees, AA, AS, and AAS, as their core credential, and 24 states now let select community colleges award bachelor's degrees too.

Can you get a bachelor's degree at a community college?

Yes, in 24 states as of 2024. Programs usually target workforce fields like nursing, cybersecurity, and applied technology, and most require an existing associate degree for admission.

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