2025 Best Comparative Literature Doctor's Degree Schools in California

a doctor's degree in comparative literature is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #117 out of 862 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.

In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Comparative Literature Doctor's Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 41 doctor's degrees in comparative literature during the 2022-2023 academic year.

What's on this page: * Our Methodology

• Best Doctor’s Degree Schools List

Choosing a Great Comparative Literature School for Your Doctor's Degree

Your choice of comparative literature for getting your doctor'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

A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.

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 comparative literature students as compared to other majors.
• Major Demand - How many other comparative literature students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor'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.
• Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized comparative literature related body.

Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for comparative literature students working on their doctor's degree.

One Size Does Not Fit All

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 Comparative Literature Doctor's Degree Schools in California list to help you make the college decision.

Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Comparative Literature in California

Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in comparative literature.

Top California Schools for a Doctorate in Comparative Literature

1

University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA

Doctor's Degree Highest Degree Type

6 Annual Graduates

University of Southern California is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in comparative literature. Located in the city of Los Angeles, USC is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.More information about a doctorate in comparative literature from University of Southern California

2

University of California - Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA

Doctor's Degree Highest Degree Type

9 Annual Graduates

University of California - Santa Cruz is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in comparative literature. Located in the small city of Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz is a public university with a large student population.More information about a doctorate in comparative literature from University of California - Santa Cruz

3

University of California - Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA

Doctor's Degree Highest Degree Type

5 Annual Graduates

Every student who is interested in a doctor's degree in comparative literature needs to look into University of California - Santa Barbara. UCSB is a very large public university located in the midsize suburb of Santa Barbara.More information about a doctorate in comparative literature from University of California - Santa Barbara

4

University of California - Berkeley
Berkeley, CA

Doctor's Degree Highest Degree Type

5 Annual Graduates

University of California - Berkeley is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a doctor's degree in comparative literature. Located in the medium-sized city of Berkeley, UC Berkeley is a public university with a fairly large student population.More information about a doctorate in comparative literature from University of California - Berkeley

Best Comparative Literature Colleges in the Far Western US Region

Explore all the Best Comparative Literature Colleges in the Far Western US Area or other specific states within that region.

State	Colleges	Degrees Awarded
Washington	216	1
Oregon	145	4

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Rankings in Majors Related to Comparative Literature

One of 5 majors within the Linguistics & Comparative Literature area of study, Comparative Literature has other similar majors worth exploring.

Most Popular Majors Related to Comparative Literature

Related Major	Annual Graduates
Linguistics	41
Other Linguistic, Comparative, & Related Language Studies & Services	3

Notes and References

• 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).
• Credit for the banner image above goes to Pandit Rahul Sanskrutayan, Banshidhar Mohanty. More about our data sources and methodologies.