Ranked #28 in popularity, public health is one of the most sought-after bachelor's degree programs in the nation. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in Virginia to determine which ones were the best for public health students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 425 bachelor's degrees in public health to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Public Health School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The public health bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality public health 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
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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 bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor'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 - The number of public health students who choose to seek a bachelor'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 public health to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
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 bachelor'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 Public Health Bachelor's Degree Schools in Virginia list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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Every student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in public health needs to check out George Mason University. Located in the suburb of Fairfax, GMU is a public university with a very large student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the public health program state that they receive average early career income of $37,025.
Liberty University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in public health. Liberty University is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the small city of Lynchburg.
Soon after graduating, public health bachelor's recipients typically earn around $36,641 at the beginning of their 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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
The public health bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality public health program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
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