Educational Administration is of the hottest doctor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #6 most popular major 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 21 schools in the Plains States Region to determine which ones were the best for educational administration students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 954 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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection 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 doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor'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 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 complete 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 the Plains States Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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University of Minnesota - Twin Cities is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in educational administration. UMN Twin Cities is a fairly large public university located in the city of Minneapolis.
Students who graduate with their doctorate from the education admin program report average early career earnings of $76,482.
Saint Cloud State University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a doctor's degree in educational administration. Located in the city of Saint Cloud, St. Cloud State University is a public university with a large student population.
Doctorate recipients from the educational administration program at Saint Cloud State University earn $13,842 above the typical graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
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).