If you pursue a bachelor's degree in social sciences, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #3 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 19 schools in Virginia to determine which ones were the best for social sciences students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 5,113 bachelor's degrees in social sciences to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Social Sciences School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of social sciences for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of different 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 bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor'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 much a school focuses on social sciences students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other social sciences students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor'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 social sciences to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized social sciences related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for social sciences students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Social Sciences Bachelor's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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
Your choice of social sciences for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
