Ranked #3 in popularity, rehabilitation & therapeutic professions is one of the most sought-after doctor's degree programs in the nation. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 64 schools in the Southeast Region to determine which ones were the best for rehabilitation & therapeutic professions students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 3,614 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
Your choice of rehabilitation & therapeutic professions 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 good 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 rehabilitation & therapeutic professions students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of rehabilitation & therapeutic professions students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
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 rehabilitation & therapeutic professions 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 rehabilitation & therapeutic professions related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for rehabilitation & therapeutic professions students working on their doctor's degree.
More Ways to Rank Rehabilitation & Therapeutic Professions Schools
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 Rehabilitation & Therapeutic Professions Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region list to help you make the college decision.
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ADBLOCK #171
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Rehabilitation & Therapeutic Professions in the Southeast Region
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in rehabilitation & therapeutic professions. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
12 Top Southeast Region Schools for a Doctorate in Rehabilitation
Any student who is interested in a doctor's degree in rehabilitation & therapeutic professions has to look into Duke University. Located in the city of Durham, Duke is a private not-for-profit university with a large student population.
After graduation, rehabilitation doctorate recipients usually earn about $68,778 in the first five years of their career.
Medical University of South Carolina is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in rehabilitation & therapeutic professions. Located in the city of Charleston, MUSC is a public university with a small student population.
Doctorate students who receive their degree from the rehabilitation program make around $70,247 in the first couple years of their career.
Any student who is interested in a doctor's degree in rehabilitation & therapeutic professions has to look into Shenandoah University. Shenandoah is a small private not-for-profit university located in the small city of Winchester.
Rehabilitation & Therapeutic Professions doctor's degree recipients from Shenandoah University receive an earnings boost of approximately $5,151 above the typical income of rehabilitation & therapeutic professions graduates.
Located in the city of Birmingham, UAB is a public university with a very large student population.
Those rehabilitation & therapeutic professions students who get their doctor's degree from University of Alabama at Birmingham make $2,439 more than the typical rehabilitation grad.
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Additional Noteworthy Schools
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Rehabilitation & Therapeutic Professions Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region award.
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 rehabilitation & therapeutic professions 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:
