2025 Best Physical Sciences Master's Degree Schools in Illinois
4Colleges in Illinois
331Master's Degrees
Physical Sciences isn't the most popular master's program in the world, but it's not the least popular either. To be more precise it ranks #19 in popularity out of 37 majors in the country. 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 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Physical Sciences Master's Degree Schools in Illinois ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 331 master's degrees in physical sciences during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Physical Sciences School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of physical sciences 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 account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of different 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 physical sciences students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other physical sciences students want to attend this school to pursue a master'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 physical sciences 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 physical sciences related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for physical sciences 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 Physical Sciences Master's Degree Schools in Illinois list to help you make the college decision.
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
Your choice of physical sciences 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:
