a master's degree in real estate is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #107 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.
In 2024, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Real Estate Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 58 master's degrees in real estate during the 2020-2021 academic year.
Choosing a Great Real Estate School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of real estate for getting your master's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. 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 take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection of different 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 much a school focuses on real estate students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other real estate 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 much debt real estate 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 real estate related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for real estate 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 Real Estate Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
Best Schools for Master’s Students to Study Real Estate in the Great Lakes Region
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a master's degree in real estate.
Top Great Lakes Region Schools for a Master's in Real Estate
DePaul University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in real estate. DePaul is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Chicago.
Master's graduates who receive their degree from the real estate program earn an average of $92,303 for their early career.
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).