2024 Best Public Policy Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region
3Colleges in the Southwest Region
31Doctor's Degrees
a doctor's degree in public policy is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #77 out of 306 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2024 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for public policy students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 31 doctor's degrees in public policy during the 2020-2021 academic year.
Choosing a Great Public Policy School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of public policy 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 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 various 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 much a school focuses on public policy students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other public policy 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 much debt public policy 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 public policy related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for public policy students working on their doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Public Policy 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 Public Policy in the Southwest Region
Learn about the top ranked colleges and universities for public policy students seeking a a doctor's degree.
Top Southwest Region Schools for a Doctorate in Public Policy
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).