Ranked #19 in popularity, public administration is one of the most sought-after master's degree programs in the nation. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
College Factual looked at 5 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Public Administration Master's Degree Schools in Missouri ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 271 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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a master'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 for a Master's Degree 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.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master'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 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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for public administration students working on their master's degree.
The public admin 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 Public Administration Master's Degree Schools in Missouri.
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University of Missouri - Columbia is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in public administration. Located in the city of Columbia, Mizzou is a public university with a very large student population.
Master's recipients from the public administration degree program at University of Missouri - Columbia make $10,781 above the typical college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Missouri State University - Springfield is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a master's degree in public administration. Missouri State is a fairly large public university located in the medium-sized city of Springfield.
Students who graduate with their master's from the public admin program report average early career earnings of $42,399.
It is difficult to beat Park University if you want to pursue a master's degree in public administration. Park University is a moderately-sized private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Parkville.
Those public administration students who get their master's degree from Park University earn $7,086 more than the average public admin grad.
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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
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