Let’s say you want to get a master’s degree in one of America’s most popular and growing fields. Perhaps you’re looking to study nursing or educational administration, or you want to earn an MBA. You wouldn’t be alone; these are all extremely popular master’s degrees, each offered by hundreds of universities. And therein lies the problem—how to decide?
Picking a master’s program might end up being one of the biggest choices you ever make, and yet surprisingly little guidance is out there. Around the country, tuition and enrollment for master’s programs just keep going up, while earnings for degree holders have barely budged since 2000. Programs are often expensive, with little financial aid, which means that few schools can offer any guarantee that graduates will be able to pay off the debt they took on. How can you know if the program you’re considering will actually pay off?
Almost no one has attempted to assess this question in a systematic way. U.S. News & World Report has a ranking for some (but not all) of the most popular master’s degree fields, like social work, nursing, and communication disorders. But its rankings largely ignore how much programs cost or how much debt students tend to graduate with. With the exception of their business school rankings, U.S. News’s standings of popular master’s degree programs don’t even factor in how much students tend to earn after they graduate.
If you Google master’s programs in, say, counseling psychology, you’ll likely stumble across sites like BestCounselingDegrees.net and Psychology.org, which appear to be trustworthy consumer guides but are in fact largely unhelpful, possibly AI-written, algorithmically boosted content mills both owned by the same shady holding company, Red Ventures.
At the Washington Monthly, we want to finally empower master’s degree applicants to make informed choices. That’s why we are unveiling a new set of rankings, our “Best and Worst Colleges for Master’s Degrees.” (The rankings are available here and at the bottom of this page.) We assess master’s degree programs in the 10 most popular fields—business, educational administration, nursing, teacher education, social work, and so on—based on two fundamental questions that students are asking: How much debt will I graduate with, and how much money can I expect to earn?
For data, we relied on the federal government’s College Scorecard, which, as of this spring, provides a highly revealing statistic: the median annual earnings of graduates five years after they attended a program. Ours is the first-ever ranking of master’s degrees to include this statistic. We combined it with students’ median debt at graduation to calculate debt as a percentage of earnings, a statistic that makes for easy comparison across programs.
Spend a few moments perusing the rankings, and you’ll notice a couple of striking patterns. First, there are vast differences in earnings and debt between colleges on the “Best” and “Worst” rankings in the same fields of study. Some programs pay off magnitudes better than others. Second, many of the “Worst” performers are colleges and universities that enjoy sterling national reputations, while some of the “Best” are humble institutions, many of them regional public universities that you might never have heard of.
For instance, prestigious Northwestern University offers a master’s in counseling that saddles average graduates with $153,657 in debt, while graduates of the program earn on average only $56,897 annually five years later. Debt as a percentage of earnings for the program is 270 percent, which puts it in the number one spot on our “Worst Clinical, Counseling, and Applied Psychology” ranking.
Contrast that with the number seven school on the “Best” ranking in that field, Aurora University, which is located only 55 miles away from Northwestern. Students at Aurora’s addiction-focused mental health masters (classified under the same “Clinical, Counseling, and Applied Psychology” umbrella by the government) graduate with an average debt of $27,588, close to one-sixth as much as Northwestern grads, and make 34 percent higher salaries ($76,132) five years out. Cal State Long Beach, Florida Tech, and CUNY–Baruch College have master’s programs under that same umbrella, where the ratio of debt to income is at least10 times lower than Northwestern. (For more on Northwestern’s predatory behavior, see my investigation here.)
The pattern is the same in other fields of study. A master’s degree in nursing from Yale University might look impressive on your wall, but it’ll burden you with an average debt of $118,849 when you graduate. For the same degree from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, you’ll borrow only $23,302, one-fifth as much, and still earn slightly more than the Yalies ($133,871 versus $128,563).
A master’s in social work from the prestigious University of Southern California will leave you $125,849 in debt for the privilege of making $72,091 annually five years later. With the same credential from San Diego State, you’ll make nearly $4,867 more a year and carry about one-sixth the debt. You can get a master’s in educational administration at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, earn $74,964 a year, and be shackled with $55,857 in debt; or make more ($86,863) and borrow six times less ($8,973) by attending Miami University–Oxford.
How do elite universities like Northwestern, Yale, USC, and Penn get away with ripping off students when there are far better options at other, perfectly respectable colleges? Because the government lets them. By law, the amount of federally backed loans students can take out for undergraduate degrees is capped. But in 2005, a Republican Congress passed, and President George W. Bush signed, legislation creating an uncapped federal graduate degree loan program as part of a budget reconciliation package. Predictably, the creation of an uncapped program incentivized colleges to raise tuition rates even faster for master’s programs than for bachelor’s programs. Despite representing only 21 percent of students in higher education, graduate students took out 47 percent of all federal loans in 2021–22.
Hundreds of colleges have taken advantage of the uncapped subsidy and lax regulatory environment by starting up or expanding master’s programs, in part to make up for demographically driven enrollment declines at the undergrad level. But elite nonprofit colleges have the brand names students want and so have been able to get away with charging astronomical tuition for programs that don’t deliver.
Having helped create the problem, Washington needs to fix it. And there are new Republican-sponsored bills floating around Capitol Hill to impose caps on federal loans for graduate programs. But until they pass, the only way prospective students can avoid making life-altering mistakes is to arm themselves with good information.
Of course, master’s degrees often pay off. Adults with master’s degrees earn, on average, roughly $13,000 more per year than those who have only a bachelor’s degree. They can be good investments of your time and money—but it all depends on where you make that investment.
Our rankings are a good place to begin to figure that out. But they only show results for some schools and programs. Data for any we do not include can be found on the Department of Education’s College Scorecard site by searching for an institution, navigating to “Fields of Study,” clicking “See All Fields of Study,” and searching for a particular field and degree level. There you’ll find the median debt at graduation and the median income after five years, which we’ve used to construct this ranking. We encourage you to do that for any program you might be considering, or one your friends or relatives might be considering. It might save them from decades of crippling debt.
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