a doctor's degree in social work is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #42 out of 306 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 2 schools in California to determine which ones were the best for social work students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 73 doctor's degrees in social work during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their doctor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their doctor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Social Work Doctor's Degree Schools in California ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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It is hard to beat University of Southern California if you wish to pursue 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.
Soon after graduating, social work doctorate recipients usually make an average of $95,093 at the beginning of their careers.
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).
