If you pursue a master's degree in public administration, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #19 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 6 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Public Administration Master's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 351 master's degrees in public administration during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Public Administration School for Your Master's Degree
The public admin 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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master'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 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
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 public administration students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of public administration 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 much debt public administration 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 public administration related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for public administration students working on their master'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 Public Administration Master's Degree Schools in Virginia list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Virginia Tech is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in public administration. Virginia Tech is a fairly large public school located in the city of Blacksburg.
Master's recipients from the public administration degree program at Virginia Tech make $14,073 above the typical college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
George Mason University is a good choice for students pursuing a master's degree in public administration. Located in the large suburb of Fairfax, GMU is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Those public administration students who get their master's degree from George Mason University make $18,028 more than the standard public admin graduate.
Liberty University is a good choice for students pursuing a master's degree in public administration. Liberty University is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the small city of Lynchburg.
Master's graduates who receive their degree from the public admin program make an average of $57,882 for their early career.
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 public admin 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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
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