Graduate school may be a critical step in your higher education, whether you are interested in expanding your knowledge, learning a specialization, or earning advanced credentials required by your profession. The best graduate schools in DC offer advanced degrees, such as master’s and doctoral degrees, as well as opportunities for independent research, mentorships, and professional networking.
There are 6 doctorate-granting universities in DC, the top 5 satisfy our criteria. The best graduate schools below are composed of both private and public schools that satisfy the following four conditions:
The people affiliated with a school are ultimately what make it great. This is why influence gets at the heart of what is truly best in education. At the undergraduate level, the best colleges and universities are those with the highest concentration of influence. Our Concentrated Influence metric adjusts overall influence by size of undergraduate student body, thus allowing smaller schools to compete with larger schools so long as they have proportionately as strong influential faculty and alums.
But at the graduate level, the combined influence score of a college or university’s top academic influencers is the best indicator of academic excellence. Overall influence, and not influence controlled by other variables, thus becomes the best gauge of academic excellence at the graduate level. Where smaller size is an advantage at the undergraduate level (hence Concentrated Influence), graduate studies benefit from a large and vibrant community of graduate students, who promise to become the new generation of academic influencers.
If you are serious about finding the best graduate schools, you should be asking where the most influential professors are teaching, and whether their graduates themselves are advancing the school’s reputation for academic excellence. Most ranking sites rely on an opaque combination of reputation surveys and arbitrary performance metrics. Influence, as measured by our InfluenceRanking engine, provides a ranking that is free from bias, insulated from manipulation, and reflective of real-world educational outcomes.
Find out more about our methodology here.
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Tuition + fees
$55K
Acceptance
43%
Graduation
85%
Student body
21K
Median SAT/ACT
1375/31
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George Washington University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$56K
Acceptance
17%
Graduation
94%
Student body
14K
Median SAT/ACT
1465/33
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Georgetown University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$50K
Acceptance
39%
Graduation
79%
Student body
12K
Median SAT/ACT
1300/29
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American University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$27K
Acceptance
39%
Graduation
64%
Student body
8K
Median SAT/ACT
1205/24
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Howard University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$48K
Acceptance
82%
Graduation
74%
Student body
5K
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The Catholic University of America’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$17K
Acceptance
63%
Graduation
44%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
915/16
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Gallaudet University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
What are Custom College Rankings?
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