If you pursue a bachelor's degree in public relations & advertising, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #32 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual reviewed 17 schools in the Plains States Region to determine which ones were the best for bachelor's degree seekers in the field of public relations & advertising. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 972 bachelor's degrees in public relations & advertising during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Public Relations & Advertising School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The public relations bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality public relations 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 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 combination of different 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 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 public relations & advertising students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other public relations & advertising 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 easy is it for public relations & advertising to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized public relations & advertising related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for public relations & advertising students working on their bachelor's degree.
More Ways to Rank Public Relations & Advertising Schools
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Public Relations & Advertising Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region 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 Nebraska - Lincoln is a great option for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in public relations & advertising. Located in the large city of Lincoln, UNL is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Public Relations & Advertising bachelor's degree recipients from University of Nebraska - Lincoln receive an earnings boost of around $2,489 above the average income of public relations & advertising graduates.
Iowa State University is a good decision for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in public relations & advertising. Iowa State is a very large public university located in the small city of Ames.
Public Relations & Advertising bachelor's degree recipients from Iowa State University earn a boost of approximately $2,851 over the average income of public relations & advertising majors.
It is hard to beat Drake University if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in public relations & advertising. Drake is a small private not-for-profit university located in the city of Des Moines.
Bachelor's recipients from the public relations & advertising degree program at Drake University get $4,813 more than the average college graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
UNI is a medium-sized public university located in the small city of Cedar Falls.
Those public relations & advertising students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Northern Iowa make $4,076 more than the typical public relations grad.
Webster is a medium-sized private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Saint Louis.
Public Relations & Advertising bachelor's degree recipients from Webster University receive an earnings boost of approximately $2,742 above the average income of public relations & advertising 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).