Urban Studies is about average in terms of popularity for bachelor's degrees programs. That is, it ranks #163 out of the 363 majors across the country that we analyze each year. So, it might take a little more work to find colleges and universities that offer the degree program.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 9 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Urban Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools in New York ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 181 bachelor's degrees in urban studies during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Urban Studies School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The urban studies bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality urban studies 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
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 take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of various 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 urban studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of urban studies students who choose to seek a bachelor'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 urban studies students go into to obtain their bachelor'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 urban studies related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for urban studies students working on their bachelor's degree.
The urban studies 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 Urban Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools in New York.
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.
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Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in urban studies has to look into Barnard College. Barnard is a small private not-for-profit college located in the city of New York.
After graduating, urban studies bachelor's recipients generally earn around $40,294 in the first five years of their career.
QC is a large public college located in the city of Queens.
Bachelor's recipients from the urban studies major at Queens College earn $2,095 more than the average 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).