If you plan on getting your doctor's degree in anthropology, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #50 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 11 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for anthropology students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 472 doctor's degrees in anthropology during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Anthropology School for Your Doctor's Degree
The anthropology doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality anthropology 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 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 anthropology students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other anthropology students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor'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 anthropology 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 anthropology related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for anthropology 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 Anthropology Doctor's Degree Schools ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Harvard University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in anthropology. Located in the city of Cambridge, Harvard is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.More information about a doctorate in anthropology from Harvard 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).