You'll be studying one of the lesser sought-after majors if you pursue a Master's Degree in area, ethnic, culture, & gender studies. It is ranked #30 out of 37 major degree programs in terms of popularity. This may make is a little harder to find a school that is a good fit for you.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Area, Ethnic, Culture, & Gender Studies Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 552 master's degrees in area, ethnic, culture, & gender studies during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Area, Ethnic, Culture, & Gender Studies School for Your Master's Degree
The area, ethnic, culture, & gender studies master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality area, ethnic, culture, & gender studies 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 master'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 include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host 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 much a school focuses on area, ethnic, culture, & gender studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other area, ethnic, culture, & gender 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, ethnic, culture, & gender 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, ethnic, culture, & gender studies related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for area, ethnic, culture, & gender studies students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Area, Ethnic, Culture, & Gender Studies Schools
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 Area, Ethnic, Culture, & Gender Studies Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "ethnic-cultural-gender-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, ethnic, culture, & gender studies master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality area, ethnic, culture, & gender studies program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
