When it comes to popularity, a master's degree in communication & journalism sits in the middle of the road, ranking #15 out of 37 majors in the country. So, it might take a little more work to find colleges and universities that offer the degree program.
College Factual looked at 7 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Communication & Journalism Master's Degree Schools in Illinois ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 725 master's degrees in communication & journalism during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Communication & Journalism School for Your Master's Degree
The communication & journalism master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality communication & 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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a school'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.
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 much a school focuses on communication & journalism students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other communication & journalism students want to attend this school to pursue a master'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 communication & journalism 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 communication & journalism related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for communication & journalism students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Communication & Journalism Schools
The communication & journalism school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Communication & Journalism Master's Degree Schools in Illinois.
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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 communication & journalism master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality communication & journalism program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
