Legal Professions is of the hottest doctor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #2 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 2 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Legal Professions Doctor's Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 3,986 doctor's degrees in legal professions during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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DEBUG: Checking offer "Legal Services & Studies (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.7
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DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Paralegal (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.5)
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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 many resources a school devotes to legal professions students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of legal 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 easy is it for legal 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 legal professions related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for legal 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 Legal 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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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
