2024 Best Parks, Recreation & Leisure Studies Doctor's Degree Schools
3Colleges in the United States
7Doctor's Degrees
You'll be studying one of the lesser sought-after majors if you pursue a Doctor's Degree in parks, recreation & leisure studies. It is ranked #233 out of 306 major degree programs in terms of popularity. This may make is a little harder to find a school that is a good fit for you.
For its 2024 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for parks, recreation & leisure studies students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 7 doctor's degrees in parks, recreation & leisure studies to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Parks, Recreation & Leisure Studies School for Your Doctor's Degree
The parks & rec doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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
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 parks, recreation & leisure studies students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of parks, recreation & leisure studies students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
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 much debt parks, recreation & leisure studies 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 parks, recreation & leisure studies related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for parks, recreation & leisure studies students working on their doctor's 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 Parks, Recreation & Leisure Studies Doctor's Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Parks, Recreation & Leisure Studies in the United States
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in parks, recreation & leisure studies.
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.