2024 Best Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region
8Colleges in the Southwest Region
59Doctor's Degrees
You'll be studying one of the lesser sought-after majors if you pursue a Doctor's Degree in parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies. It is ranked #23 out of 36 major degree programs in terms of popularity. While this may limit the number of schools that offer the degree program, there are still top-quality ones to be found.
For its 2024 ranking, College Factual looked at 8 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 59 doctor's degrees in parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies during the 2020-2021 academic year.
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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 include 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 Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their doctor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their doctor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 full 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
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies in the Southwest Region
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies.
Top Southwest 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).