2025 Best Operations Research Doctor's Degree Schools
3Colleges in the United States
104Doctor's Degrees
When it comes to popularity, a doctor's degree in operations research sits in the middle of the road, ranking #131 out of 306 majors in the country. So, you may have to do some digging around to find quality schools that offer the degree program. This list can help with that.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Operations Research Doctor's Degree Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 104 doctor's degrees in operations research during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Operations Research School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of operations research for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality operations research program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their doctor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their doctor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to operations research students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of operations research students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for operations research 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 operations research related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for operations research students working on their doctor'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 Operations Research Doctor's Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
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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.
by our College Data Analytics Team
Your choice of operations research for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality operations research program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
