If you pursue a master's degree in special education, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #8 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in North Carolina to determine which ones were the best for special education students pursuing a master's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 108 master's degrees in special education to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Special Education School for Your Master's Degree
The special ed master'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 master's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree 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 master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master'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 - How many other special education students want to attend this school to pursue a master'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 special education to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
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 master's degree.
The special ed 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 Special Education Master's Degree Schools in North Carolina.
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East Carolina University is a wonderful decision for individuals interested in a master's degree in special education. Located in the small city of Greenville, ECU is a public university with a fairly large student population.
After graduating, special ed master's recipients generally make about $50,433 in the first five years of their career.
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).