If you pursue a doctor's degree in education, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #3 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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 35 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Education Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,809 doctor's degrees in education during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Education School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of education for getting your doctor'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
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 school'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.
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 education students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other education students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor's degree.
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 easy is it for education to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized education related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for education students working on their doctor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Education Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
Concordia University, Chicago is a good decision for individuals interested in a doctor's degree in education. Located in the suburb of River Forest, Concordia University, Chicago is a private not-for-profit university with a moderately-sized student population.More information about a doctorate in education from Concordia University, Chicago
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).