If you plan on getting your master's degree in applied mathematics, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #35 in the country in terms of popularity. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
College Factual looked at 9 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Applied Mathematics Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 577 master's degrees in applied mathematics during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Applied Mathematics School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of applied mathematics for getting your master's degree school matters. 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 good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination 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 applied mathematics students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of applied mathematics 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 applied mathematics 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 applied mathematics related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for applied mathematics students working on their master'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 Applied Mathematics Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
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It's difficult to beat Southern Methodist University if you wish to pursue a master's degree in applied mathematics. SMU is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Dallas.
Those applied mathematics students who get their master's degree from Southern Methodist University earn $2,467 more than the average applied math grad.
It's difficult to beat The University of Texas at Austin if you want to pursue a master's degree in applied mathematics. UT Austin is a very large public university located in the large city of Austin.
Applied Mathematics master's degree recipients from The University of Texas at Austin receive an earnings boost of around $4,018 over the typical income of applied mathematics graduates.
Arizona State University - Tempe is a wonderful decision for students pursuing a master's degree in applied mathematics. Located in the medium-sized city of Tempe, ASU - Tempe is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Soon after graduation, applied math master's recipients generally make around $76,148 in the first five years of their career.
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).