If you plan on getting your master's degree in human services, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #104 in the country in terms of popularity. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 10 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for human services students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 873 master's degrees in human services during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Human Services School for Your Master's Degree
The human services master'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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree 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.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master'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
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to human services students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of human services students who choose to seek a master'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 easy is it for human services to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized human services related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for human services students working on their master's degree.
The human services 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 Human Services Master's Degree Schools.
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Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in human services needs to look into Post University. Located in the midsize city of Waterbury, Post University is a private for-profit university with a very large student population.
Master's recipients from the human services program at Post University earn $7,766 more than the typical graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
Every student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in human services needs to check out The University of Arizona Global Campus. Located in the city of San Diego, UAGC is a private for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Soon after graduating, human services master's recipients generally make an average of $48,476 at the beginning of their careers.
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).
The human services master'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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
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