If you plan on majoring in public policy, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #113 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 2 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Public Policy Schools in North Carolina ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 464 degrees in public policy to qualified students.
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 Public Policy Schools in North Carolina list to help you make the college decision.
If you'd like to restrict your choices to just one part of the country, you can filter this list by location.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
Although we recommend filtering by degree level first, you can view the list below to see which schools give the educational experience for the public policy degree levels they offer.
Any student who is interested in public policy needs to look into Duke University. Located in the large city of Durham, Duke is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Degree recipients from the public policy program at Duke University earn $13,985 above the typical college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of the best schools in the country for getting a degree in public policy. UNC Chapel Hill is a very large public university located in the small city of Chapel Hill.
Graduates who receive their degree from the public policy program earn around $48,252 in their early career salary.
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).