Writing Studies is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #49 most popular master's degree program in the country. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
College Factual looked at 12 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Writing Studies Master's Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 401 master's degrees in writing studies during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Writing Studies School for Your Master's Degree
The writing master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Master'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 master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on writing studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of writing studies students who choose to seek a master'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 writing studies 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 writing studies related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for writing studies students working on their master's degree.
The writing 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 Writing Studies Master's Degree Schools in California.
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San Diego State University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in writing studies. SDSU is a fairly large public university located in the city of San Diego.
Those writing studies students who get their master's degree from San Diego State University receive $3,256 more than the standard writing student.
Chapman is a moderately-sized private not-for-profit university located in the medium-sized city of Orange.
Master's recipients from the writing studies major at Chapman University make $2,878 above the typical college grad in this field when they enter the workforce.
USFCA is a medium-sized private not-for-profit university located in the city of San Francisco.
Writing Studies master's degree recipients from University of San Francisco receive an earnings boost of around $12,997 above the typical earnings of writing studies 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).