a master's degree in journalism is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #102 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.
College Factual looked at 2 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Journalism Master's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 92 master's degrees in journalism to qualified students.
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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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on journalism students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other journalism students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for journalism to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized journalism related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for journalism students working on their master'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 Journalism Master's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Every student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in journalism has to check out University of Southern California. USC is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Los Angeles.
Journalism master's degree recipients from University of Southern California earn a boost of approximately $4,734 above the average income of journalism graduates.
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).
