If you pursue a master's degree in accounting, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #10 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Accounting Master's Degree Schools in Iowa ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 102 master's degrees in accounting during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Accounting School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of accounting for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality accounting 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 much a school focuses on accounting students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other accounting 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 accounting 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 accounting related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for accounting students working on their master's degree.
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 Accounting Master's Degree Schools in Iowa list to help you make the college decision.
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Iowa State University is a great option for students interested in a master's degree in accounting. Iowa State is a very large public university located in the city of Ames.
Master's graduates who receive their degree from the accounting program earn around $64,654 in their early career salary.
University of Iowa is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in accounting. Located in the city of Iowa City, Iowa is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Master's recipients from the accounting program at University of Iowa get $3,361 more than the typical graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
It is hard to beat Upper Iowa University if you want to pursue a master's degree in accounting. UIU is a small private not-for-profit university located in the rural area of Fayette.
Master's graduates who receive their degree from the accounting program make around $58,699 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 accounting for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality accounting program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
