Religious Studies is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #72 most popular bachelor's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual reviewed 4 schools in California to determine which ones were the best for bachelor's degree seekers in the field of religious studies. Combined, these schools handed out 217 bachelor's degrees in religious studies to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Religious Studies School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The religion bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality religion program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges 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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on religious studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other religious studies students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
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 religious studies 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 religious studies related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for religious studies students working on their bachelor'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 Religious Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools in California list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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University of California - Santa Barbara is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in religious studies. UCSB is a very large public university located in the suburb of Santa Barbara.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the religion program report average early career income of $19,911.
California Baptist University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in religious studies. Cal Baptist is a large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Riverside.
Those religious studies students who get their bachelor's degree from California Baptist University make $7,491 more than the average religion graduate.
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 religion bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality religion program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
