Communication & Media Studies is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #44 most popular master's degree program in the country. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual looked at 5 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Communication & Media Studies Master's Degree Schools in Illinois ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 135 master's degrees in communication & media studies during the 2022-2023 academic year.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Media Communication (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 0.8
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Media Communication (I Have a Bachelors)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.8)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 1
DEBUG: relevant_offers > 0, checking for ESYOH offers
DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 1 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.8
DEBUG: esyoh_offers count = 1
DEBUG: ESYOH offers found, rendering ESYOH widget
DEBUG: most_relevant_only = true, filtering for most relevant
DEBUG: Found 0 offers with relevance >= 1.0
DEBUG: Backfilling with 0 offers with relevance >= 0.9
DEBUG: Backfilling with 1 offers with relevance >= 0.8
Choosing a Great Communication & Media Studies School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of communication & media studies for getting your master'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. 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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include 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 much a school focuses on communication & media studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of communication & media studies students who choose to seek a master's degree at the school.
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 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 communication & media studies related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for communication & media studies 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 Communication & Media Studies Master's Degree Schools in Illinois list to help you make the college decision.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "communication-journalism-media//communication-media-studies"
Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in communication & media studies has to look into DePaul University. DePaul is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Chicago.
Students who graduate with their master's from the communications program state that they receive average early career wages of $46,389.
It's difficult to beat Illinois State University if you want to pursue a master's degree in communication & media studies. Illinois State is a fairly large public university located in the midsize suburb of Normal.
Students who graduate with their master's from the communications program report average early career earnings of $45,215.
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 master'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
,_Helsinki_Finland_(11643271925).jpg){kind=link}