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.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 2 schools in New York 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 97 doctor's degrees in social work during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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 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 in New York.
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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.
Doctorate graduates who receive their degree from the social work program make about $122,282 in their early career salary.
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).
