General Psychology is of the hottest doctor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #20 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 5 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best General Psychology Doctor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 210 doctor's degrees in general psychology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great General Psychology School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of general psychology for getting your doctor'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on general psychology students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of general psychology students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for general psychology to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized general psychology related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for general psychology students working on their doctor'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 Doctor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region list to help you make the college decision.
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University of California - Los Angeles is a great option for students interested in a doctor's degree in general psychology. Located in the city of Los Angeles, UCLA is a public university with a very large student population.
Doctorate graduates who receive their degree from the psychology program earn about $62,453 in the first couple years of their career.
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).
Your choice of general psychology for getting your doctor'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
