a master's degree in urban & regional planning is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #92 out of 343 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 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Urban & Regional Planning Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 85 master's degrees in urban & regional planning during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a quality 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 combination of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master'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 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 colleges for urban & regional planning students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Urban & Regional Planning Schools
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Urban & Regional Planning Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Every student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in urban & regional planning has to take a look at University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. UMN Twin Cities is a very large public university located in the city of Minneapolis.
Master's recipients from the urban & regional planning program at University of Minnesota - Twin Cities earn $6,985 above the standard graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
It is hard to beat University of Kansas if you want to pursue a master's degree in urban & regional planning. Located in the city of Lawrence, KU is a public university with a very large student population.
Master's graduates who receive their degree from the urban planning program earn around $52,241 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).
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
