You'll be studying one of the lesser sought-after majors if you pursue a Master's Degree in liberal arts / sciences & humanities. It is ranked #29 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.
College Factual looked at 2 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Liberal Arts / Sciences & Humanities Master's Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 110 master's degrees in liberal arts / sciences & humanities during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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 liberal arts / sciences & humanities students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of liberal arts / sciences & humanities 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 liberal arts / sciences & humanities 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 liberal arts / sciences & humanities related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for liberal arts / sciences & humanities students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Liberal Arts / Sciences & Humanities Schools
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 Liberal Arts / Sciences & Humanities Master's Degree Schools in California 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
