You'll be studying one of the lesser sought-after majors if you pursue a Master's Degree in history. It is ranked #24 out of 37 major degree programs in terms of popularity. While this may limit the number of schools that offer the degree program, there are still top-quality ones to be found.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in Virginia to determine which ones were the best for history students pursuing a master's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 254 master's degrees in history to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great History School for Your Master's Degree
The history master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a master'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 consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master'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
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 history students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of history students who choose to seek a master'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 much debt history students go into to obtain their master'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 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.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best History Master's Degree Schools in Virginia list, to help you choose the best school for you.
Liberty University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a master's degree in history. Liberty University is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Lynchburg.More information about a master’s in history from Liberty University
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 history master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
