a bachelor's degree in philosophy is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #61 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Philosophy Bachelor's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 196 bachelor's degrees in philosophy during the 2022-2023 academic year.
DEBUG: offers_url is valid, proceeding to fetch data
DEBUG: No offers_data.offers found, showing generic ESYOH widget
Choosing a Great Philosophy School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The philosophy bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality philosophy 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 bachelor'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 school's overall Best Colleges 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 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 bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor'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 philosophy students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of philosophy students who choose to seek a bachelor'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 philosophy students go into to obtain their bachelor'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 philosophy related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for philosophy students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Philosophy Bachelor's Degree Schools in Virginia list, to help you choose the best school for you.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "philosophy-and-religious-studies//philosophy"
It's hard to beat Virginia Commonwealth University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in philosophy. VCU is a fairly large public university located in the midsize city of Richmond.
After graduation, philosophy bachelor's recipients generally earn around $26,192 in their early careers.
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.
by our College Data Analytics Team
The philosophy bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality philosophy program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
