2025 Best Religion/Religious Studies Doctor's Degree Schools
4Colleges in the United States
199Doctor's Degrees
a doctor's degree in religion/religious studies is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #99 out of 862 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. 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 Religion/Religious Studies Doctor's Degree Schools ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 199 doctor's degrees in religion/religious studies to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Religion/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 include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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 religion/religious studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of religion/religious 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.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized religion/religious studies related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for religion/religious studies students working on their doctor's degree.
More Ways to Rank Religion/Religious Studies Schools
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Religion/Religious Studies Doctor's Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Religion/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 religion/religious 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.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).