Communication & Media Studies is of the hottest bachelor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #5 most popular major in the country. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 10 schools in Alabama 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 588 bachelor'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 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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 collection of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 colleges for communication & media studies students working on their bachelor'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 Bachelor's Degree Schools in Alabama ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "communication-journalism-media//communication-media-studies"
Auburn University is a wonderful decision for individuals interested in a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies. Located in the city of Auburn, Auburn is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Those communication & media studies students who get their bachelor's degree from Auburn University make $2,771 more than the typical communications graduate.
It is hard to beat The University of Alabama if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies. Located in the midsize city of Tuscaloosa, UA is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the communication & media studies degree program at The University of Alabama earn $7,632 more than the typical college grad in this field shortly after graduation.
It is difficult to beat Samford University if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies. Samford is a moderately-sized private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Birmingham.
Bachelor's recipients from the communication & media studies degree program at Samford University get $6,532 above the average college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
It is hard to beat University of Alabama at Birmingham if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in communication & media studies. UAB is a very large public university located in the city of Birmingham.
After graduation, communications bachelor's recipients typically make around $33,190 in their early careers.
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).