2025 Best Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region
3Colleges in the Great Lakes Region
94Doctor's Degrees
If you're seeking a Doctor's Degree in parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies, you will have fewer peers than average since the major degree program is the #23 one in the country in terms of popularity.As such, your educational options may be more limited than if you were in a more popular field.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in the Great Lakes Region to determine which ones were the best for parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 94 doctor's degrees in parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies for getting your doctor's 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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor's 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 parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor's 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 parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students working on their doctor's degree.
More Ways to Rank Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies Schools
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, & Fitness Studies Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies in the Great Lakes Region
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies.
Top Great Lakes Region Schools for a Doctorate in Parks & Rec
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).