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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 5 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Psychology Doctor's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 357 doctor's degrees in psychology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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 consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor'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.
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.
The psychology school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Psychology Doctor's Degree Schools in Virginia.
Regent University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in psychology. Located in the city of Virginia Beach, Regent is a private not-for-profit university with a large student population.More information about a doctorate in psychology from Regent University
Any student who is interested in a doctor's degree in psychology has to take a look at Liberty University. Liberty University is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the small city of Lynchburg.More information about a doctorate in psychology from Liberty 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.
