Ranked #6 in popularity, educational administration is one of the most sought-after doctor's degree programs in the nation. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 7 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Educational Administration Doctor's Degree Schools in Michigan ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 170 doctor's degrees in educational administration during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Educational Administration School for Your Doctor's Degree
The education admin doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their doctor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their doctor'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 educational administration students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of educational administration students who choose to seek a doctor'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 educational administration students go into to obtain their doctor'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 educational administration related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for educational administration students working on their doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Educational Administration Doctor's Degree Schools in Michigan ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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It's difficult to beat Western Michigan University if you want to pursue a doctor's degree in educational administration. WMU is a fairly large public university located in the city of Kalamazoo.
Students who graduate with their doctorate from the education admin program report average early career wages of $88,781.
Michigan State University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a doctor's degree in educational administration. Michigan State is a very large public university located in the city of East Lansing.
Students who graduate with their doctorate from the education admin program report average early career wages of $82,912.
Every student who is interested in a doctor's degree in educational administration has to look into Oakland University. Located in the suburb of Rochester Hills, Oakland is a public university with a large student population.
Soon after graduating, education admin doctorate recipients generally make about $90,920 in the first five years of their career.
Ferris is a moderately-sized public university located in the remote town of Big Rapids.
Those educational administration students who get their doctor's degree from Ferris State University make $7,523 more than the typical education admin graduate.
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).