If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in ethnic studies, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #73 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 23 schools in California to determine which ones were the best for ethnic studies students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,693 bachelor's degrees in ethnic studies during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Explore societal similarities and differences as seen through cultural, biological, archaeological and linguistic lenses when you earn one of your degrees in anthropology from Southern New Hampshire University.
Choosing a Great Ethnic Studies School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of ethnic studies for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. 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 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 school'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.
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 many resources a school devotes to ethnic studies students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of ethnic studies 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 ethnic studies 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 ethnic studies related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for ethnic studies students working on their bachelor's degree.
The ethnic studies 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 Ethnic Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools in California.
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.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "ethnic-cultural-gender-studies//ethnic-studies"
Explore societal similarities and differences as seen through cultural, biological, archaeological and linguistic lenses when you earn one of your degrees in anthropology from Southern New Hampshire University.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in ethnic studies needs to look into University of California - Los Angeles. UCLA is a fairly large public university located in the large city of Los Angeles.
After graduation, ethnic studies bachelor's recipients usually make an average of $29,914 in the first five years of their career.
University of California - Berkeley is a wonderful option for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in ethnic studies. Located in the medium-sized city of Berkeley, UC Berkeley is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Ethnic Studies bachelor's degree recipients from University of California - Berkeley receive an earnings boost of around $2,687 above the typical earnings of ethnic studies majors.
University of California - Santa Barbara is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in ethnic studies. UCSB is a very large public university located in the suburb of Santa Barbara.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the ethnic studies program state that they receive average early career earnings of $32,341.
University of California - Davis is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in ethnic studies. UC Davis is a very large public university located in the suburb of Davis.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the ethnic studies program report average early career wages of $32,563.
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).