Special Education is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #55 most popular bachelor's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 7 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Special Education Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 324 bachelor's degrees in special education to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Special Education School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The special ed bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality special ed 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 bachelor'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 consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination 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 bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor'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 special education students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of special education students who choose to seek a bachelor'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 special education students go into to obtain their bachelor'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 special education related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for special education students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Special Education Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Western Washington University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in special education. Located in the small city of Bellingham, WWU is a public university with a large student population.
Those special education students who get their bachelor's degree from Western Washington University make $4,252 more than the typical special ed graduate.
University of Hawaii at Manoa is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in special education. Located in the large city of Honolulu, UH Manoa is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Special Education bachelor's degree recipients from University of Hawaii at Manoa get an earnings boost of approximately $11,736 over the average income of special education majors.
University of Nevada - Las Vegas is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in special education. Located in the medium-sized city of Las Vegas, UNLV is a public university with a very large student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the special ed program report average early career wages of $49,827.
NSC is a moderately-sized public college located in the rural area of Henderson.
Special Education bachelor's degree recipients from Nevada State College earn a boost of approximately $4,499 above the typical earnings of special education graduates.
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).