If you pursue a doctor's degree in rehabilitation & therapeutic professions, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #3 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 12 schools in California to determine which ones were the best for rehabilitation & therapeutic professions students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 2,127 doctor's degrees in rehabilitation & therapeutic professions to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Rehabilitation & Therapeutic Professions School for Your Doctor's Degree
The rehabilitation doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality rehabilitation 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 account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of different 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 rehabilitation & therapeutic professions students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other rehabilitation & therapeutic professions 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 easy is it for rehabilitation & therapeutic professions 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 rehabilitation & therapeutic professions related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for rehabilitation & therapeutic professions 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 Rehabilitation & Therapeutic Professions Doctor's Degree Schools in California ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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University of Southern California is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a doctor's degree in rehabilitation & therapeutic professions. Located in the city of Los Angeles, USC is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Students who graduate with their doctorate from the rehabilitation program report average early career earnings of $79,163.
Any student pursuing a degree in a doctor's degree in rehabilitation & therapeutic professions needs to take a look at Samuel Merritt University. Samuel Merritt University is a small private not-for-profit university located in the city of Oakland.
Those rehabilitation & therapeutic professions students who get their doctor's degree from Samuel Merritt University receive $10,263 more than the average rehabilitation grad.
It is hard to beat Mount Saint Mary's University if you wish to pursue a doctor's degree in rehabilitation & therapeutic professions. MSMU is a small private not-for-profit university located in the city of Los Angeles.
Doctorate recipients from the rehabilitation & therapeutic professions major at Mount Saint Mary's University make $5,083 above the average college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
Sac State is a very large public university located in the large city of Sacramento.
Rehabilitation & Therapeutic Professions doctor's degree recipients from California State University - Sacramento earn a boost of around $6,950 above the average earnings of rehabilitation & therapeutic professions graduates.
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).
The rehabilitation doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality rehabilitation program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
