If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in special education, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #55 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual reviewed 13 schools in Illinois to determine which ones were the best for bachelor's degree seekers in the field of special education. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 484 bachelor's degrees in special education during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 take this into account we include a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of various 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 bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor'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 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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for special education students working on their bachelor'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 Special Education Bachelor's Degree Schools in Illinois list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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Illinois State University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in special education. Illinois State is a very large public university located in the suburb of Normal.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the special ed program state that they receive average early career wages of $48,358.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in special education has to check out University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. UIUC is a fairly large public university located in the city of Champaign.
Those special education students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign make $5,305 more than the standard special ed graduate.
Northern Illinois University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in special education. Located in the small suburb of Dekalb, NIU is a public university with a large student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the special ed program state that they receive average early career income of $46,578.
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).