Psychology is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #6 most popular doctor's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 37 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Psychology Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 1,313 doctor's degrees in psychology to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Psychology School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of psychology for getting your doctor's degree school matters. 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 take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination 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 psychology students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of psychology students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
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 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 psychology related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for psychology students working on their doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Psychology Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
Vanderbilt University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a doctor's degree in psychology. Located in the city of Nashville, Vanderbilt is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.More information about a doctorate in psychology from Vanderbilt University
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
Your choice of psychology for getting your doctor's degree school matters. 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.
