Ranked #34 in popularity, general psychology is one of the most sought-after master's degree programs in the nation. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 31 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best General Psychology Master's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 954 master's degrees in general psychology to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great General Psychology School for Your Master's Degree
The psychology master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality psychology 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 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 include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master'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 master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master'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 general psychology students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other general psychology 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 easy is it for general psychology to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized general psychology related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for general psychology 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 General Psychology Master's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Every student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in general psychology has to check out University of Pennsylvania. UPenn is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Philadelphia.
Master's recipients from the general psychology degree program at University of Pennsylvania earn $25,598 more than the average college grad in this field shortly after graduation.
Towson is a fairly large public university located in the small city of Towson.
General Psychology master's degree recipients from Towson University earn a boost of approximately $6,741 above the typical income of general psychology majors.
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).