If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in child development & psychology, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #37 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 6 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Child Development & Psychology Bachelor's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 890 bachelor's degrees in child development & psychology to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Child Development & Psychology School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The child development bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. 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 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 different 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 many resources a school devotes to child development & psychology students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of child development & psychology 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 child development & psychology 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 child development & psychology related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for child development & psychology students working on their bachelor's degree.
More Ways to Rank Child Development & Psychology Schools
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Child Development & Psychology Bachelor's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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 Pennsylvania is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in child development & psychology. UPenn is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Philadelphia.
Bachelor's recipients from the child development & psychology major at University of Pennsylvania earn $5,929 above the typical college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
Located in the fringe town of Gettysburg, Gettysburg is a private not-for-profit college with a small student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the child development & psychology degree program at Gettysburg College earn $2,986 above the typical college grad with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
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.