Ranked #20 in popularity, general psychology is one of the most sought-after doctor's degree programs in the nation. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in Virginia to determine which ones were the best for general psychology students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 107 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
The psychology doctor'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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree 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 doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor'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 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 general 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 general psychology related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools 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 Virginia list to help you make the college decision.
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George Mason University is a good decision for students pursuing a doctor's degree in general psychology. Located in the suburb of Fairfax, GMU is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Students who graduate with their doctorate from the psychology program state that they receive average early career wages of $88,377.
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
The psychology doctor'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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
