Legal Professions is about average in terms of popularity for master's degrees programs. That is, it ranks #18 out of the 37 majors across the country that we analyze each year. So, you may have to do some digging around to find quality schools that offer the degree program. This list can help with that.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Legal Professions Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,327 master's degrees in legal professions during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Legal Professions School for Your Master's Degree
The legal professions master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality legal professions program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 collection 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 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 master'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 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 legal professions related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for legal professions students working on their master'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 Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region 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
The legal professions master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality legal professions program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
