If you plan on getting your doctor's degree in history, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #39 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 109 colleges and universities when compiling its 2023 Best History Doctor's Degree Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 721 doctor's degrees in history during the 2020-2021 academic year.
Choosing a Great History School for Your Doctor's Degree
The history doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality history 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
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a quality 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 for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 history students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of history students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
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.
Student Debt - How much debt history students go into to obtain their doctor's 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 history related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for history students working on their doctor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best History Doctor's Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Featured History Programs
Learn about start dates, transferring credits, availability of financial aid, and more by contacting the universities below.
Gain a rich foundation of knowledge ranging from early history to modern times with this online bachelor's degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study History in the United States
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in history. Only those schools that rank in the top 15% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
Harvard University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in history. Harvard is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the medium-sized city of Cambridge.
Doctorate recipients from the history program at Harvard University make $8,803 more than the average college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Duke University is a great decision for students interested in a doctor's degree in history. Located in the large city of Durham, Duke is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.More information about a doctorate in history from Duke University
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best History Doctor's Degree Schools 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.