a master's degree in journalism is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #102 out of 343 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2024 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in the New England Region to determine which ones were the best for journalism students pursuing a master's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 124 master's degrees in journalism to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Journalism School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of journalism for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality journalism 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 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 collection 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 journalism students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of journalism 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 much debt journalism students go into to obtain their master'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 journalism related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for journalism students working on their master's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Journalism Master's Degree Schools in the New England Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
Best Schools for Master’s Students to Study Journalism in the New England Region
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a master's degree in journalism.
Top New England Region Schools for a Master's in Journalism
It's difficult to beat Boston University if you wish to pursue a master's degree in journalism. Located in the large city of Boston, Boston U is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Journalism master's degree recipients from Boston University receive an earnings boost of approximately $2,835 over the average earnings of journalism graduates.
Any student who is interested in a master's degree in journalism needs to look into Northeastern University. Located in the city of Boston, Northeastern is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
After graduation, journalism master's recipients usually earn about $37,996 at the beginning of their careers.
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).