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.
College Factual looked at 2 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Communication Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 114 doctor's degrees in communication sciences during the 2022-2023 academic year.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Communications Disorders (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 0.9
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Communications Disorders (I Have a Bachelors)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.9)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 1
DEBUG: relevant_offers > 0, checking for ESYOH offers
DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 1 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.8
DEBUG: esyoh_offers count = 1
DEBUG: ESYOH offers found, rendering ESYOH widget
DEBUG: most_relevant_only = true, filtering for most relevant
DEBUG: Found 0 offers with relevance >= 1.0
DEBUG: Backfilling with 1 offers with relevance >= 0.9
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
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 communication sciences students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of communication sciences students who choose to seek a doctor'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 easy is it for communication sciences to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
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 colleges for communication sciences students working on their doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Communication Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "health-care-professions//communication-sciences"
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
