2025 Best Economics Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region
8Colleges in the Great Lakes Region
254Doctor's Degrees
Economics is of the hottest doctor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #24 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 8 schools in the Great Lakes Region to determine which ones were the best for economics students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 254 doctor's degrees in economics to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Economics School for Your Doctor's Degree
The economics doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 - The number of economics students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
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 easy is it for economics 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 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 doctor's degree.
The economics 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 Economics Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region.
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University of Chicago is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in economics. Located in the large city of Chicago, UChicago is a private not-for-profit university with a large student population.More information about a doctorate in economics from University of Chicago
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).