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.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 6 schools in Rhode Island to determine which ones were the best for communication & media studies students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 335 bachelor'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 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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection 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 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 bachelor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Communication & Media Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools in Rhode Island list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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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University of Rhode Island is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies. URI is a large public university located in the suburb of Kingston.
Bachelor's recipients from the communication & media studies degree program at University of Rhode Island earn $3,922 more than the typical college grad in this field shortly after graduation.
It is difficult to beat Brown University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies. Brown is a large private not-for-profit university located in the midsize city of Providence.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the communications program earn about $23,738 in the first couple years of their career.
Every student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies has to look into Bryant University. Located in the large suburb of Smithfield, Bryant is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the communication & media studies major at Bryant University get $12,208 above the standard college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies has to check out Roger Williams University. RWU is a small private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Bristol.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the communications program make around $33,596 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 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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