General Business/Commerce is of the hottest master's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #28 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 2 schools in Virginia to determine which ones were the best for general business/commerce students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 148 master's degrees in general business/commerce during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to general business/commerce students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other general business/commerce students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How much debt general business/commerce 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 general business/commerce related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for general business/commerce students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank General Business/Commerce Schools
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best General Business/Commerce Master's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Virginia Commonwealth University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in general business/commerce. Located in the city of Richmond, VCU is a public university with a very large student population.
Students who graduate with their master's from the general business program state that they receive average early career earnings of $70,104.
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
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