If you plan on getting your master's degree in theology & religious vocations, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #11 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 8 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Theology & Religious Vocations Master's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 1,508 master's degrees in theology & religious vocations to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Theology & Religious Vocations School for Your Master's Degree
The theology & religious vocations master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality theology & religious vocations program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master'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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to theology & religious vocations students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other theology & religious vocations students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
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 theology & religious vocations 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 theology & religious vocations related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for theology & religious vocations students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Theology & Religious Vocations Schools
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 Theology & Religious Vocations Master's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region list to help you make the college decision.
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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 theology & religious vocations master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality theology & religious vocations program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
