General Education is of the hottest master's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #12 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 5 schools in Tennessee to determine which ones were the best for general education students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 199 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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 account for this we include 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.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master'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 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 complete 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.
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 Tennessee list to help you make the college decision.
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Cumberland University is a great choice for individuals interested in a master's degree in general education. CU is a small private not-for-profit university located in the town of Lebanon.
Students who graduate with their master's from the education program state that they receive average early career income of $50,607.
Austin Peay State University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a master's degree in general education. Located in the midsize city of Clarksville, Austin Peay State University is a public university with a moderately-sized student population.
Students who graduate with their master's from the education program state that they receive average early career wages of $48,419.
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).