a master's degree in behavioral science is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #105 out of 343 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in the Plains States Region to determine which ones were the best for behavioral science students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 85 master's degrees in behavioral science during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Behavioral Science School for Your Master's Degree
The behavioral science master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality behavioral science program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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 master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master'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 many resources a school devotes to behavioral science students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of behavioral science 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 easy is it for behavioral science to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized behavioral science related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for behavioral science students working on their master's degree.
The behavioral science school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Behavioral Science Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region.
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Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in behavioral science has to look into Washington University in St Louis. WUSTL is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Saint Louis.
Master's students who receive their degree from the behavioral science program earn an average of $66,574 for their early 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).
The behavioral science master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality behavioral science program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
