a master's degree in pastoral counseling & specialized ministries is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #100 out of 343 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.
College Factual looked at 3 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Pastoral Counseling & Specialized Ministries Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 109 master's degrees in pastoral counseling & specialized ministries during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Choosing a Great Pastoral Counseling & Specialized Ministries School for Your Master's Degree
The pastoral counseling master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. 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
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master'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.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 pastoral counseling & specialized ministries students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of pastoral counseling & specialized ministries students who choose to seek a master'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.
Student Debt - How much debt pastoral counseling & specialized ministries students go into to obtain their master'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 pastoral counseling & specialized ministries related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for pastoral counseling & specialized ministries students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Pastoral Counseling & Specialized Ministries Schools
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Pastoral Counseling & Specialized Ministries Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
Best Schools for Master’s Students to Study Pastoral Counseling & Specialized Ministries in the Plains States Region
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a master's degree in pastoral counseling & specialized ministries.
Top Plains States Region Schools for a Master's in Pastoral Counseling
It is hard to beat Bethel University Minnesota if you want to pursue a master's degree in pastoral counseling & specialized ministries. Bethel University Minnesota is a small private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Saint Paul.
Master's students who receive their degree from the pastoral counseling program make an average of $45,641 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.