If you pursue a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #5 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 51 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Communication & Media Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 2,383 bachelor's degrees in communication & media studies to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Communication & Media Studies School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of communication & media studies for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor'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 include a college's overall Best Colleges 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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor'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 communication & media studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other communication & media studies students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor'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 much debt communication & media studies students go into to obtain their bachelor'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 communication & media studies related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for communication & media studies students working on their bachelor's degree.
The communications school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Communication & Media Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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ADBLOCK #171
Best Schools for Bachelor’s Students to Study Communication & Media Studies in the Plains States Region
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
10 Top Plains States Region Schools for a Bachelor's in Communications
It is hard to beat University of Kansas if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies. Located in the small city of Lawrence, KU is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the communication & media studies major at University of Kansas earn $2,264 more than the average college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
It is hard to beat University of Iowa if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies. Located in the small city of Iowa City, Iowa is a public university with a fairly large student population.
After graduating, communications bachelor's recipients typically make around $37,647 in their early careers.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies has to look into University of Missouri - Columbia. Located in the midsize city of Columbia, Mizzou is a public university with a very large student population.
Communication & Media Studies bachelor's degree recipients from University of Missouri - Columbia get an earnings boost of approximately $5,570 above the average income of communication & media studies majors.
Located in the city of Saint Charles, Lindenwood University is a private not-for-profit university with a moderately-sized student population.
Those communication & media studies students who get their bachelor's degree from Lindenwood University make $3,071 more than the typical communications graduate.
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Honorable Mentions
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Communication & Media Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region award.
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 communication & media studies for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
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