If you pursue a doctor's degree in communication sciences, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #30 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in Michigan to determine which ones were the best for communication sciences students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 39 doctor's degrees in communication sciences to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Communication Sciences School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of communication sciences 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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor'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 doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on communication sciences students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other communication sciences students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor'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 much debt communication sciences students go into to obtain their doctor'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 communication sciences related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for communication sciences students working on their doctor'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 Communication Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in Michigan list to help you make the college decision.
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It is difficult to beat Central Michigan University if you wish to pursue a doctor's degree in communication sciences. Central Michigan is a large public university located in the distant town of Mount Pleasant.
After graduation, communication sciences doctorate recipients typically earn around $74,265 in their early careers.
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).
Your choice of communication sciences 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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
