If you plan on getting your doctor's degree in religious studies, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #80 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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Religious Studies Doctor's Degree Schools ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 228 doctor's degrees in religious studies to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Religious Studies School for Your Doctor's Degree
The religion doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality religion 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
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 consider a college'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 much a school focuses on religious studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other religious 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 religious 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 religious studies related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for religious 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 Religious Studies Doctor's Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Religious Studies in the United States
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in religious studies.
It is hard to beat Emory University if you wish to pursue a doctor's degree in religious studies. Emory is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Atlanta.
Religious Studies doctor's degree recipients from Emory University get an earnings boost of approximately $5,917 above the typical earnings of religious studies graduates.
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).
The religion doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality religion program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
