Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies is about average in terms of popularity for master's degrees programs. That is, it ranks #16 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 8 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies Master's Degree Schools in Illinois ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 660 master's degrees in parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies School for Your Master's Degree
The parks & rec master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality parks & rec 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
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students who choose to seek a master's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How much debt parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies 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 parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies 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 Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies Master's Degree Schools in Illinois 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).
The parks & rec master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality parks & rec program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
