If you pursue a master's degree in general psychology, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #34 most popular program in the country. 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 7 schools in Virginia to determine which ones were the best for general psychology students pursuing a master's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 260 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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 school'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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 Virginia list to help you make the college decision.
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George Mason University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a master's degree in general psychology. Located in the large suburb of Fairfax, GMU is a public university with a very large student population.
Master's recipients from the general psychology degree program at George Mason University get $20,891 above the typical college grad in this field when they enter the workforce.
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).
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
