a master's degree in area studies is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #116 out of 343 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. 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 the Great Lakes Region to determine which ones were the best for master's degree seekers in the field of area studies. Combined, these schools handed out 126 master's degrees in area studies to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Area Studies School for Your Master's Degree
The area studies 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. 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 good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection of different 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 many resources a school devotes to area studies students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other area studies 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 area 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 area studies related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for area studies students working on their master's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Area Studies Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "ethnic-cultural-gender-studies//area-studies"
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
The area studies 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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
