If you plan on getting your master's degree in human development & family studies, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #97 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 29 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Human Development & Family Studies Master's Degree Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,373 master's degrees in human development & family studies during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Human Development & Family Studies School for Your Master's Degree
The human development master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality human development program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 human development & family studies students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other human development & family studies students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
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 human development & family 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 human development & family studies related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for human development & family studies students working on their master'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 Human Development & Family Studies Master's Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
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Tufts University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a master's degree in human development & family studies. Tufts is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Medford.
Master's students who receive their degree from the human development program earn around $45,105 in the first couple years of their career.
It's hard to beat University of Florida if you wish to pursue a master's degree in human development & family studies. Located in the city of Gainesville, UF is a public university with a very large student population.
Students who graduate with their master's from the human development program report average early career wages of $49,947.
K -State is a large public university located in the city of Manhattan.
Those human development & family studies students who get their master's degree from Kansas State University make $2,944 more than the average human development student.
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 human development master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality human development program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
