Social Work is of the hottest master's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #3 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 5 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Social Work Master's Degree Schools in Massachusetts ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,763 master's degrees in social work during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Social Work School for Your Master's Degree
The social work master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. 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
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of different 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 master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 master'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 easy is it for social work to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
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 colleges for social work students working on their master'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 Master's Degree Schools in Massachusetts list to help you make the college decision.
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Simmons University is a good choice for students pursuing a master's degree in social work. Located in the city of Boston, Simmons is a private not-for-profit university with a moderately-sized student population.
Students who graduate with their master's from the social work program state that they receive average early career income of $56,039.
Salem State University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in social work. Salem State is a medium-sized public university located in the suburb of Salem.
Master's recipients from the social work degree program at Salem State University get $2,312 above the typical college graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
It's difficult to beat Westfield State University if you wish to pursue a master's degree in social work. Westfield is a small public university located in the large suburb of Westfield.
Soon after graduating, social work master's recipients generally earn about $56,882 in their early careers.
Bridgewater State University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a master's degree in social work. Located in the suburb of Bridgewater, Bridgewater State is a public university with a medium-sized student population.
Those social work students who get their master's degree from Bridgewater State University earn $4,668 more than the average social work graduate.
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).
The social work master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. 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:
