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.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 9 schools in Pennsylvania to determine which ones were the best for general psychology students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 240 master's degrees in general psychology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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 take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination 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 colleges for general psychology students working on their master's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best General Psychology Master's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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University of Pennsylvania is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a master's degree in general psychology. UPenn is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Philadelphia.
Those general psychology students who get their master's degree from University of Pennsylvania make $18,560 more than the average psychology 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.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).