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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Public Policy Master's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 228 master's degrees in public policy during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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 include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination 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 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.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Public Policy Master's Degree Schools in Virginia list to help you make the college 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 pursuing a degree in a master's degree in public policy needs to look into George Mason University. Located in the large suburb of Fairfax, GMU is a public university with a very large student population.
Master's recipients from the public policy program at George Mason University earn $6,600 above the typical graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Liberty University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a master's degree in public policy. Liberty University is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Lynchburg.
Students who graduate with their master's from the public policy program report average early career wages of $58,353.
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 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:
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