If you pursue a master's degree in general education, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #12 most popular program in the country. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 3 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best General Education Master's Degree Schools in North Carolina ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 103 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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 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.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 schools for general education students working on their master's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best General Education Master's Degree Schools in North Carolina ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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It is hard to beat University of North Carolina at Wilmington if you wish to pursue a master's degree in general education. UNCW is a fairly large public university located in the city of Wilmington.
Soon after graduation, education master's recipients typically make around $45,465 in the first five years of their career.
Western Carolina University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in general education. Located in the town of Cullowhee, WCU is a public university with a large student population.
Students who graduate with their master's from the education program state that they receive average early career income of $47,964.
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 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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
