Ranked #3 in popularity, education is one of the most sought-after doctor'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 7 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Education Doctor's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,459 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. 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 school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection of various 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 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.
The education school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Education Doctor's Degree Schools in Virginia.
Every student pursuing a degree in a doctor's degree in education needs to take a look at Liberty University. Liberty University is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Lynchburg.More information about a doctorate in education from Liberty University
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 education for getting your doctor'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.
