If you pursue a master's degree in statistics, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #56 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
In 2024, College Factual analyzed 98 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Statistics Master's Degree Schools ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 3,415 master's degrees in statistics to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Statistics School for Your Master's Degree
The stats master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality stats 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 consider a college'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.
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 statistics students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of statistics 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.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized statistics related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for statistics 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 Statistics Master's Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
Best Schools for Master’s Students to Study Statistics in the United States
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a master's degree in statistics. Only those schools that rank in the top 15% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
Any student who is interested in a master's degree in statistics has to check out Cornell University. Located in the city of Ithaca, Cornell is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.More information about a master’s in statistics from Cornell University
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Statistics Master's Degree Schools award.
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).