a bachelor's degree in journalism is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #46 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Journalism Bachelor's Degree Schools in Iowa ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 186 bachelor's degrees in journalism during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Journalism School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of journalism for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality journalism program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges 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 Iowa ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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Every student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in journalism needs to check out University of Iowa. Located in the city of Iowa City, Iowa is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the journalism program report average early career wages of $34,743.
Iowa State University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in journalism. Iowa State is a fairly large public university located in the small city of Ames.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the journalism program state that they receive average early career income of $39,347.
Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in journalism needs to take a look at Drake University. Drake is a small private not-for-profit university located in the midsize city of Des Moines.
Journalism bachelor's degree recipients from Drake University get an earnings boost of about $3,245 above the typical income 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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
Your choice of journalism for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality journalism program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
