Ranked #12 in popularity, general education is one of the most sought-after master's degree programs in the nation. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 5 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best General Education Master's Degree Schools in Washington ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 486 master's degrees in general education during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great General Education School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of general education for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality education 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 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.
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 general education students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of general education 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 general education 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 general education related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for general education students working on their master's degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best General Education Master's Degree Schools in Washington list to help you make the college decision.
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Whitworth University is a great choice for students interested in a master's degree in general education. Located in the large suburb of Spokane, Whitworth is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
General Education master's degree recipients from Whitworth University receive an earnings boost of approximately $9,557 over the typical income of general education graduates.
Gonzaga University is a wonderful option for students interested in a master's degree in general education. Gonzaga is a medium-sized private not-for-profit university located in the city of Spokane.
Master's students who receive their degree from the education program make an average of $61,913 for their early career.
Eastern Washington University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in general education. EWU is a fairly large public university located in the town of Cheney.
Students who graduate with their master's from the education program report average early career earnings of $67,369.
Located in the large suburb of Bothell, UW Bothell is a public university with a moderately-sized student population.
Those general education students who get their master's degree from University of Washington - Bothell Campus receive $6,192 more than the typical education 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).