International Relations & National Security is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #43 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 13 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best International Relations & National Security Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 548 master's degrees in international relations & national security during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great International Relations & National Security School for Your Master's Degree
The international relations master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality international relations 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 make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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 international relations & national security students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of international relations & national security students who choose to seek a master'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 much debt international relations & national security 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 international relations & national security related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for international relations & national security students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank International Relations & National Security Schools
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best International Relations & National Security Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region list to help you make the college decision.
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George Mason University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a master's degree in international relations & national security. GMU is a fairly large public university located in the suburb of Fairfax.
Master's recipients from the international relations & national security major at George Mason University make $11,310 above the average college graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
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).