a master's degree in communication & media studies is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #44 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 Communication & Media Studies Master's Degree Schools in Alabama ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 142 master's degrees in communication & media studies during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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. 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 good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination 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 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 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 full 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.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Communication & Media Studies Master's Degree Schools in Alabama ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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The University of Alabama is one of the best schools in the country for getting a master's degree in communication & media studies. Located in the city of Tuscaloosa, UA is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Master's recipients from the communication & media studies program at The University of Alabama get $11,092 above the typical college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
University of Alabama at Birmingham is a good decision for individuals interested in a master's degree in communication & media studies. UAB is a very large public university located in the medium-sized city of Birmingham.
Master's students who receive their degree from the communications program earn about $45,087 for their early career.
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
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