a bachelor's degree in public policy is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #121 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual reviewed 8 schools in the Southeast Region to determine which ones were the best for bachelor's degree seekers in the field of public policy. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 697 bachelor's degrees in public policy during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Public Policy School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of public policy for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. 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 bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges 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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor'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 policy students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of public policy students who choose to seek a bachelor'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 bachelor'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 bachelor'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 Policy Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Prepare yourself to make the decisions that best serve a community, its constituents and its economic growth with this specialized business degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
Duke University is a wonderful choice for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in public policy. Duke is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Durham.
Public Policy bachelor's degree recipients from Duke University get an earnings boost of around $14,016 over the typical income of public policy majors.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in public policy. Located in the city of Chapel Hill, UNC Chapel Hill is a public university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the public policy program make around $48,252 in the first couple years of working.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in public policy needs to check out Vanderbilt University. Located in the city of Nashville, Vanderbilt is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Those public policy students who get their bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt University make $10,538 more than the average public policy 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).
Your choice of public policy for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. 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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