a bachelor's degree in public policy is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #121 out of 363 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 7 schools in the Great Lakes Region to determine which ones were the best for public policy students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 305 bachelor's degrees in public policy to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Public Policy School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The public policy bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality public policy 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
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges 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 bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 public policy students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other public policy students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor'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 public policy students go into to obtain their bachelor'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 public policy related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for public policy students working on their bachelor'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 Public Policy Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Featured Public Policy Programs
Learn about start dates, transferring credits, availability of financial aid, and more by contacting the universities below.
Prepare yourself to make the decisions that best serve a community, its constituents and its economic growth with this specialized business degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
University of Chicago is a wonderful decision for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in public policy. Located in the city of Chicago, UChicago is a private not-for-profit university with a large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the public policy degree program at University of Chicago make $9,124 more than the standard college graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
Northwestern University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in public policy. Northwestern is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the small city of Evanston.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the public policy program earn about $40,701 for their early career.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in public policy has to take a look at University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. U-M is a very large public university located in the medium-sized city of Ann Arbor.
Those public policy students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Michigan - Ann Arbor receive $2,388 more than the standard public policy graduate.
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).