If you pursue a doctor's degree in music, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #22 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual reviewed 9 schools in the Great Lakes Region to determine which ones were the best for doctor's degree seekers in the field of music. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 296 doctor's degrees in music during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Earn the music business degree that fits into the business world – and partners Southern New Hampshire University with world-renowned Berklee College of Music.
Choosing a Great Music School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of music for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality music 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 doctor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 music students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other music 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 much debt music 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 music related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for music 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 Music Doctor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Earn the music business degree that fits into the business world – and partners Southern New Hampshire University with world-renowned Berklee College of Music.
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a doctor's degree in music. U-M is a very large public university located in the city of Ann Arbor.
Music doctor's degree recipients from University of Michigan - Ann Arbor get an earnings boost of about $7,742 above the average income of music majors.
Every student pursuing a degree in a doctor's degree in music needs to look into Indiana University - Bloomington. IU Bloomington is a very large public university located in the city of Bloomington.
Those music students who get their doctor's degree from Indiana University - Bloomington earn $4,624 more than the average music graduate.
Ohio State is a fairly large public university located in the city of Columbus.
Music doctor's degree recipients from Ohio State University - Main Campus get an earnings boost of approximately $2,396 over the average income of music majors.
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.