Social Work is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #42 most popular doctor's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual reviewed 14 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for doctor's degree seekers in the field of social work. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 926 doctor's degrees in social work during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Social Work School for Your Doctor's Degree
The social work doctor'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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to social work students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other social work students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for social work to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized social work related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for social work students working on their doctor's degree.
The social work 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 Social Work Doctor's Degree Schools.
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University of Southern California is a great option for students pursuing a doctor's degree in social work. USC is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Los Angeles.
Doctorate students who receive their degree from the social work program make around $95,093 in the first couple years of working.
New York University is a great option for students pursuing a doctor's degree in social work. Located in the large city of New York, NYU is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Doctorate recipients from the social work degree program at New York University earn $28,000 above the typical college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Every student who is interested in a doctor's degree in social work needs to check out Rutgers University - New Brunswick. Rutgers New Brunswick is a very large public university located in the small city of New Brunswick.
Those social work students who get their doctor's degree from Rutgers University - New Brunswick receive $14,576 more than the standard social work student.
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).