a doctor's degree in public health is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #32 out of 306 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 Public Health Doctor's Degree Schools in California ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 86 doctor's degrees in public health to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Public Health School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of public health for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality public health 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
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account 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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 public health students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other public health 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.
Student Debt - How much debt public health 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 public health related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for public health students working on their doctor's degree.
The public health school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Public Health Doctor's Degree Schools in California.
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It's hard to beat University of California - Los Angeles if you wish to pursue a doctor's degree in public health. UCLA is a very large public university located in the large city of Los Angeles.
After graduating, public health doctorate recipients typically earn an average of $115,362 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 public health for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality public health program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
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