Urban & Regional Planning is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #92 most popular master's degree program in the country. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 6 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Urban & Regional Planning Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 145 master's degrees in urban & regional planning to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Urban & Regional Planning School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of urban & regional planning for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality urban planning program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 account for this we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master'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.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master'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 many resources a school devotes to urban & regional planning students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other urban & regional planning students want to attend this school to pursue a master'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 urban & regional planning to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized urban & regional planning related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for urban & regional planning students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Urban & Regional Planning Schools
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 Urban & Regional Planning Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
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The University of Texas at Austin is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in urban & regional planning. UT Austin is a fairly large public university located in the city of Austin.
Those urban & regional planning students who get their master's degree from The University of Texas at Austin receive $3,423 more than the standard urban planning student.
Arizona State University - Tempe is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in urban & regional planning. Located in the midsize city of Tempe, ASU - Tempe is a public university with a very large student population.
Master's students who receive their degree from the urban planning program earn about $57,345 for their early career.
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).
Your choice of urban & regional planning for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality urban planning program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
