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.
College Factual reviewed 3 schools in South Dakota to determine which ones were the best for bachelor's degree seekers in the field of special education. Combined, these schools handed out 57 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 college's overall Best Colleges 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 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 colleges 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 South Dakota 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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It is difficult to beat University of South Dakota if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in special education. USD is a moderately-sized public university located in the distant town of Vermillion.
Soon after graduating, special ed bachelor's recipients generally earn about $46,439 in the first five years of their career.
Dakota State University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in special education. Located in the distant town of Madison, Dakota State is a public university with a small student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the special ed program state that they receive average early career earnings of $42,318.
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).
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.
