If you plan on getting your doctor's degree in child development & psychology, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #38 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual looked at 6 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Child Development & Psychology Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 151 doctor's degrees in child development & psychology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Child Development & Psychology School for Your Doctor's Degree
The child development doctor'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree 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.
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 doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor'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 child development & psychology students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other child development & psychology students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor'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 child development & psychology students go into to obtain their doctor'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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for child development & psychology students working on their doctor's degree.
More Ways to Rank Child Development & Psychology Schools
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 Child Development & Psychology Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
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University of Michigan - Ann Arbor is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in child development & psychology. Located in the city of Ann Arbor, U-M is a public university with a very large student population.
Soon after graduation, child development doctorate recipients generally earn an average of $73,130 at the beginning of their careers.
Every student who is interested in a doctor's degree in child development & psychology needs to take a look at Ohio State University - Main Campus. Located in the large city of Columbus, Ohio State is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Those child development & psychology students who get their doctor's degree from Ohio State University - Main Campus earn $9,073 more than the standard child development grad.
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 child development doctor'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
