Public Relations & Advertising is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #60 most popular master's degree program in the country. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Public Relations & Advertising Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 128 master's degrees in public relations & advertising during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Learn how to use the latest technology and tactics to manage the flow of information between brands and the public with your Master's in Communication with a concentration in Public Relations at Southern New Hampshire University.
Keep your skills and knowledge at the forefront of new media technologies with this specialized online master's from Southern New Hampshire University.
Choosing a Great Public Relations & Advertising School for Your Master's Degree
The public relations master'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree 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 master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master'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 public relations & advertising students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of public relations & advertising 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 easy is it for public relations & advertising 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 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 master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Public Relations & Advertising Schools
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Public Relations & Advertising Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Learn how to use the latest technology and tactics to manage the flow of information between brands and the public with your Master's in Communication with a concentration in Public Relations at Southern New Hampshire University.
Keep your skills and knowledge at the forefront of new media technologies with this specialized online master's from Southern New Hampshire University.
It's hard to beat Webster University if you want to pursue a master's degree in public relations & advertising. Webster is a medium-sized private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Saint Louis.
Soon after graduating, public relations master's recipients typically earn an average of $50,814 in their early careers.
Every student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in public relations & advertising has to check out Bellevue University. Located in the large suburb of Bellevue, Bellevue University is a private not-for-profit university with a large student population.
Those public relations & advertising students who get their master's degree from Bellevue University earn $3,683 more than the typical public relations grad.
Today's business environment demands marketing professionals to be nimble. To strategically assess resources. To provide creative solutions on the fly.
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
The public relations master'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
