a master's degree in public policy is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #55 out of 343 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual looked at 6 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Public Policy Master's Degree Schools in the New England Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 664 master's degrees in public policy to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Public Policy School for Your Master's Degree
The public policy 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 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 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 policy students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of public policy 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 public policy 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 public policy related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for public policy students working on their master's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Public Policy Master's Degree Schools in the New England Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Fit new strategic skills into your public service passion and goals when you earn an MBA in Public Administration from Southern New Hampshire University.
Every student who is interested in a master's degree in public policy needs to look into Brandeis University. Brandeis is a medium-sized private not-for-profit university located in the city of Waltham.
Master's recipients from the public policy major at Brandeis University get $5,263 above the standard college grad in this field shortly after graduation.
It is difficult to beat Brown University if you want to pursue a master's degree in public policy. Brown is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the medium-sized city of Providence.
Those public policy students who get their master's degree from Brown University receive $2,331 more than the standard public policy graduate.
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).