If you plan on getting your doctor's degree in social work, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #42 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Social Work Doctor's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 176 doctor's degrees in social work during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Social Work School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of social work for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality social work program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 social work students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of social work students who choose to seek a doctor'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 much debt social work students go into to obtain their doctor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized social work related body.
Our full 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.
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 Middle Atlantic Region list to help you make the college decision.
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New York University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a doctor's degree in social work. NYU is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of New York.
Social Work doctor's degree recipients from New York University receive an earnings boost of around $13,482 over the average income of social work majors.
Rutgers University - New Brunswick is a wonderful choice for individuals pursuing a doctor's degree in social work. Located in the small city of New Brunswick, Rutgers New Brunswick is a public university with a very large student population.
Soon after graduation, social work doctorate recipients typically make around $108,858 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).
Your choice of social work for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality social work program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
