Ranked #2 in popularity, legal professions is one of the most sought-after doctor's degree programs in the nation. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 8 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Legal Professions Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 4,878 doctor's degrees in legal professions to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Legal Professions School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of legal professions for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality legal professions 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 college'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 much a school focuses on legal professions students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other legal 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 much debt legal 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 legal professions related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for legal professions students working on their doctor's degree.
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 Legal Professions Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college 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
Your choice of legal professions for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality legal professions program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
