If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in journalism, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #46 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 2 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Journalism Bachelor's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 97 bachelor's degrees in journalism during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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 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 many resources a school devotes to journalism students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other journalism 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 journalism 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 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 bachelor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Journalism Bachelor's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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 Richmond is a wonderful choice for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in journalism. Located in the city of University of Richmond, URichmond is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
Those journalism students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Richmond make $8,970 more than the standard journalism grad.
Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in journalism needs to check out Radford University. Located in the town of Radford, Radford is a public university with a medium-sized student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the journalism program state that they receive average early career earnings of $25,675.
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).
