a master's degree in economics is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #41 out of 343 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 2 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Economics Master's Degree Schools in Maryland ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 516 master's degrees in economics 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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on economics students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other economics students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How much debt economics students go into to obtain their master's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized economics related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for economics students working on their master's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Economics Master's Degree Schools in Maryland ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Johns Hopkins University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in economics. Johns Hopkins is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Baltimore.
Master's recipients from the economics major at Johns Hopkins University earn $10,446 above the typical college grad in this field shortly after graduation.
Any student who is interested in a master's degree in economics has to look into University of Maryland - College Park. UMCP is a fairly large public university located in the suburb of College Park.
Master's students who receive their degree from the economics program make around $79,163 in the first couple years of working.
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).
