a master's degree in history is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #51 out of 343 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.
College Factual looked at 8 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best History Master's Degree Schools in California ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 239 master's degrees in history to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great History School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of history for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality history 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 make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 history students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other history students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
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 easy is it for history to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized history related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for history students working on their master's degree.
The history 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 History Master's Degree Schools in California.
Any student who is interested in a master's degree in history needs to look into California State University - Sacramento. Located in the city of Sacramento, Sac State is a public university with a very large student population.
After graduation, history master's recipients usually earn an average of $33,736 at the beginning of their careers.
Cal State LA is a very large public university located in the city of Los Angeles.
Master's recipients from the history program at California State University - Los Angeles get $11,216 more than the standard college graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
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.