2025 Best Sociology Doctor's Degree Schools in California
5Colleges in California
94Doctor's Degrees
Sociology is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #45 most popular doctor'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 5 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Sociology Doctor's Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 94 doctor's degrees in sociology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Sociology School for Your Doctor's Degree
The sociology doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality sociology 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 college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host 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 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 much a school focuses on sociology students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of sociology students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
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 much debt sociology students go into to obtain their doctor'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 sociology related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for sociology students working on their doctor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Sociology Doctor's Degree Schools in California list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Every student who is interested in a doctor's degree in sociology needs to look into Stanford University. Located in the suburb of Stanford, Stanford is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.More information about a doctorate in sociology from Stanford 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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
The sociology doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality sociology program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
