If you pursue a master's degree in curriculum & instruction, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #13 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 5 schools in California to determine which ones were the best for curriculum & instruction students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 376 master's degrees in curriculum & instruction during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Curriculum & Instruction School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of curriculum & instruction for getting your master's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. 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 college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree 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 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 curriculum & instruction students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of curriculum & instruction 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 much debt curriculum & instruction students go into to obtain their master'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 curriculum & instruction related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for curriculum & instruction students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Curriculum & Instruction Schools
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Curriculum & Instruction Master's Degree Schools in California list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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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
Your choice of curriculum & instruction for getting your master's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
