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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 5 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Journalism Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 92 master's degrees in journalism during the 2022-2023 academic year.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Journalism (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 1
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Journalism (I Have a Bachelors)" ACCEPTED (relevance 1)
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 1 offers with relevance >= 1.0
Choosing a Great Journalism School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of journalism for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality journalism program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of various 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 many resources a school devotes to journalism students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of journalism 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 journalism 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 journalism related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for journalism 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 Journalism Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "communication-journalism-media//journalism"
It is difficult to beat Kent State University at Kent if you wish to pursue a master's degree in journalism. Located in the large suburb of Kent, Kent State is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Journalism master's degree recipients from Kent State University at Kent earn a boost of about $10,868 over the average earnings of journalism majors.
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).