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.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for public policy students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 291 bachelor's degrees in public policy to qualified students.
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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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges 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.
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 full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for public policy students working on their bachelor'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 Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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.
It's hard to beat Arizona State University - Tempe if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in public policy. Located in the midsize city of Tempe, ASU - Tempe is a public university with a very large student population.
Public Policy bachelor's degree recipients from Arizona State University - Tempe get an earnings boost of around $3,809 above the typical income of public policy majors.
Southern Methodist University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in public policy. SMU is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Dallas.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the public policy program make around $40,434 for their early career.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in public policy has to check out Arizona State University - Skysong. ASU - Skysong is a fairly large public university located in the city of Scottsdale.
Bachelor's recipients from the public policy degree program at Arizona State University - Skysong earn $3,809 above the typical college graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
The University of Texas at Dallas is a good option for students interested in a bachelor's degree in public policy. UT Dallas is a very large public university located in the city of Richardson.
Soon after graduating, public policy bachelor's recipients typically earn about $43,837 in the first five years of their 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).