by our College Data Analytics Team
College Factual analyzes over 2,000 colleges and universities in its annual rankings and ranks them in a variety of ways, including most diverse, best overall quality, best for non-traditional students, and much more.
Emerson College was awarded 28 badges in the 2025 rankings. The highest ranked major at the school is drama & theater arts.
Explore the best ranked schools for the programs you are most interested in.
Emerson is ranked #127 out of 2,152 schools in the nation for overall quality on College Factual's 2025 Best Colleges list. This puts it in the top 10% of all schools in the nation. This is an improvement over the previous year, when Emerson held the #179 spot on the Best Overall Colleges list.
Out of the 63 colleges in Massachusetts, Emerson is ranked at #16.
Emerson College has an acceptance rate of 43%, which means the school is serious about who it admits. Take your time in putting together a strong application that highlights why you are a good fit for Emerson.
About 22% of students accepted to Emerson submitted their SAT scores. When looking at the 25th through the 75th percentile, SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing scores ranged between 650 and 730. Math scores were between 600 and 700.
With a student to faculty ratio of 15 to 1, Emerson College is about average in this regard as the nationwide rate is 15 to 1. While this does not translate directly to class size, it's a good indicator of how much time professors will have to spend with their students on a one-on-one basis.
Another measure that is often used to estimate how much access students will have to their professors is how many faculty members are full-time. The idea here is that part-time faculty tend to spend less time on campus, so they may not be as available to students as full-timers.
The full-time faculty percentage at Emerson College is 30%. This is lower than the national average of 47%.
The freshmen retention rate of 88% tells us that most first-year, full-time students like Emerson College enough to come back for another year. This is a fair bit higher than the national average of 68%. That's certainly something to check off in the good column about the school.
Students are considered to have graduated on time if they finish their studies within four years. At Emerson the on-time graduation rate of first-time, full-time students is 75%. That is great when compared to the national average of 33.3%
Find out more about the retention and graduation rates at Emerson College.
During the 2017-2018 academic year, there were 3,708 undergraduates at Emerson with 3,626 being full-time and 82 being part-time.
| $0-30 K | $30K-48K | $48-75 | $75-110K | $110K + |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $36,327 | $37,072 | $43,618 | $47,558 | $55,749 |
The net price is calculated by adding tuition, room, board and other costs and subtracting financial aid.Note that the net price is typically less than the published for a school. For more information on the sticker price of Emerson, see our tuition and fees and room and board pages.
It's not uncommon for college students to take out loans to pay for school. In fact, almost 66% of students nationwide depend at least partially on loans. At Emerson, approximately 53% of students took out student loans averaging $12,551 a year. That adds up to $50,204 over four years for those students.
Get more details about the location of Emerson College.
Contact details for Emerson are given below.
| Contact Details | |
|---|---|
| Address: | 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116-4624 |
| Phone: | 617-824-8500 |
| Website: | www.emerson.edu/ |
| Most Popular Majors | Bachelor’s Degrees | Average Salary of Graduates |
|---|---|---|
| Film, Video & Photographic Arts | 359 | $27,032 |
| Communication Sciences | 259 | NA |
| Radio, Television & Digital Communication | 185 | NA |
| Writing Studies | 185 | $33,441 |
| Business/Corporate Communications | 146 | NA |
| Drama & Theater Arts | 146 | $19,560 |
| Marketing | 141 | $41,651 |
| Teacher Education Subject Specific | 141 | NA |
| Journalism | 121 | $39,703 |
| Graphic Communications | 121 | NA |
Online learning is becoming popular at even the oldest colleges and universities in the United States. Not only are online classes great for returning adults with busy schedules, they are also frequented by a growing number of traditional students.
In 2022-2023, 1,302 students took at least one online class at Emerson College. This is a decrease from the 1,534 students who took online classes the previous year.
| Year | Took at Least One Online Class | Took All Classes Online |
|---|---|---|
| 2022-2023 | 1,302 | 845 |
| 2021-2022 | 1,534 | 889 |
| 2020-2021 | 2,242 | 780 |
| 2018-2019 | 129 | 85 |
If you’re considering Emerson College, here are some more schools you may be interested in knowing more about.
Curious on how these schools stack up against Emerson? Pit them head to head with College Combat, our free interactive tool that lets you compare college on the features that matter most to you!
Footnotes
*The racial-ethnic minorities count is calculated by taking the total number of students and subtracting white students, international students, and students whose race/ethnicity was unknown. This number is then divided by the total number of students at the school to obtain the racial-ethnic minorities percentage.
References
More about our data sources and methodologies.