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 looked at 2 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Social Work Doctor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 97 doctor's degrees in social work to qualified students.
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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 colleges for social work students working on their doctor'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 Social Work Doctor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region list to help you make the college decision.
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University of Southern California is a wonderful choice for individuals pursuing a doctor's degree in social work. USC is a very 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 earn about $95,093 in the first couple years of working.
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).
