Psychology is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #7 most popular master'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 2 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Psychology Master's Degree Schools in Iowa ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 96 master's degrees in psychology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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 psychology students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other 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 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 psychology related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for psychology students working on their master'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 Master's Degree Schools in Iowa.
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
