Doctoral programs in liberal studies and humanities are the smallest corner of this field, and the one where a wrong choice costs the most. 21 programs report a research doctorate under these headings, they conferred 141 doctorates between them in the latest year, and you'll spend a median of close to seven years in whichever one you pick. The doctoral programs ranked below are the ones the federal record shows conferring degrees at a steady rate, which is where a search should start and not where it should stop.
Source: IPEDS, as of September 2026.
doctoral programs in liberal studies, general studies and humanities nationwide
21
doctorates those programs awarded in the latest reported year
141
doctoral programs awarded 3 or more and are ranked
10
This ranking of doctoral programs covers a field of 21 programs in 16 states and the District of Columbia, and lists the 10 strongest.
The 10 Best Doctoral Programs in Liberal Studies and Humanities, Ranked
The 10 best doctoral programs in liberal studies and humanities are those that confer the most doctorates, because doctorates awarded in the latest year is the one figure on federal record that belongs to a doctoral program, under the model on the methodology page.
1
Southern Methodist University
Doctor of Liberal Studies
Texas
95.0- Private nonprofit
- Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies
- Degrees awarded, latest year
- 17
About the Program
Reading and research on one topic or issue is the center of the Doctor of Liberal Studies, and you do it under the guidance of senior faculty. That work ends in a doctoral thesis that has to demonstrate interdisciplinary analysis, synthesis and interpretation, so a thesis that stays inside one discipline isn't what's being asked for.
Evening classes are the format, because the degree serves working professionals, and you can study part-time or full-time. The degree is for the experienced adult learner who has already earned a master's degree. After the priority deadline, applications are accepted on a rolling basis as space permits, so applying late is a risk.
Careers SMU lists for people in the degree include adjunct instructor, university administrator and college readiness educator and advocate, which are roles in education. Others on the list sit in faith and civic life, such as faith leader, spiritual leader and author, and civic leader, while non-profit founder or director, community impact director, leadership consultant and public information officer round it out.
2
Faulkner University
Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities
Alabama
80.0- Private nonprofit
- Fully Online Option
- Humanities/Humanistic Studies
- Degrees awarded, latest year
- 16
About the Program
Housed in the Honors College, this fully online Doctor of Philosophy is aimed at professionals. Faulkner describes the degree as an academic path to a career in Christian education, which tells you what the humanities are being studied toward here. If that's the career you want, the purpose of the degree and your own line up.
How long the PhD takes depends on you. It typically takes three to five years, depending on whether you study full-time or part-time and on the time you take to complete the dissertation, so your pace on the dissertation is part of what sets the finish date.
Getting in takes a master's degree from a regionally accredited institution and a cumulative GPA of at least 3.25 on a 4.0 scale. You'll also need a GRE of 297 or above or an MAT of 400 or above, taken within five years of applying, which means an old test result won't count. The written piece is a statement of personal goals, 400 to 500 words, related to the Doctor of Philosophy.
Tuition for the PhD is $660 per semester hour, and because the degree is fully online, the online course fee of $75 per semester hour applies as well. Earlier post-master's coursework offsets little of that. Up to six hours of post-master's coursework may be transferred, and even those hours need the director's approval, so don't count on past coursework to shorten the degree by much.
3
Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts
PhD in Visual Arts: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory
Maine
80.0- Private nonprofit
- Humanities/Humanistic Studies
- Degrees awarded, latest year
- 16
About the Program
Low-residency is the shape of this PhD. Your coursework and independent studies run online in fall and spring through live video conference seminars, one-on-one phone calls and asynchronous discussions, but you also travel. Across the three-year course of study you complete five residencies lasting from one to four weeks, and past residencies included Rome, Venice, Berlin, Athens, Madrid, Mexico City, New York City and Marrakech. So you need to be able to leave home for weeks at a time.
Plan on about five years, which is what the school says the path from start to PhD typically takes, ending in your dissertation defense. The 60-credit program covers three years of coursework, then written and oral qualifying exams, with the oral exams in the summer at the end of your third year. After that, the school says, you typically spend two additional years writing a dissertation of 80,000 to 100,000 words, working with an individual director who guides your research.
The PhD in Visual Arts: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory starts from philosophy. The first-year foundational seminar covers how Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud prepare the groundwork for twentieth-century art theory, so you read the theory before you write your own. By the second year, your Independent Study papers must be of publishable level, and you're asked to submit them to academic conferences or peer-reviewed journals.
Practicing artists, curators, designers and cultural professionals are who the PhD is written for, because its aim is developing, publishing, and presenting theoretical work. About half the students keep active studio practices alongside their studies. But your artwork can't be included directly in the dissertation manuscript, so if you make art, the degree still asks you to argue your ideas in a long written text.
4
University of California-Merced
Interdisciplinary Humanities, Ph.D.
California
65.0- Public
- Humanities/Humanistic Studies
- Degrees awarded, latest year
- 15
About the Program
Power and difference are the questions behind the Interdisciplinary Humanities, Ph.D. The degree is a comparative program that studies societies and cultures in relation to both, and its faculty come from disciplinary traditions in American Studies, Anthropology, Art history, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Ethnomusicology, Geography, Heritage Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature and Writing Studies, so you'd be working across fields and not inside a single department's habits.
Methods in the degree run from ethnographic fieldwork, narrative and hermeneutics to qualitative and quantitative analysis and curation, which means you aren't handed a single way of doing research. You take required courses and electives, and you demonstrate proficiency in research, analysis and critique through exams, papers and theses. The same graduate program awards an M.A. or a Ph.D., so be clear which degree you're applying for.
Public work is part of where the degree points. The program exposes you to many humanities professions and prepares you to engage the public in scholarly activities, so you see a range of humanities work before you finish. As a Ph.D. student you're expected to combine and extend multiple research practices, apply them to novel topics and produce new insights about the humanities, which means learning existing methods isn't enough.
5
Salve Regina University
Humanities and Technology Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Rhode Island
55.0- Private nonprofit
- Humanities/Humanistic Studies
- Degrees awarded, latest year
- 10
About the Program
A single question organizes this doctorate: what it means to be human in an age of advanced technology. The college calls it an interdisciplinary investigation, and you choose your concentration from four areas of inquiry rooted in the scholarly expertise of faculty and the history of the program.
Coursework is online, but you're not doing it alone or entirely from home. Foundational coursework is completed online and during four, week-long residencies on campus, and you move through as part of the Independent Research Fellows Cohort, a pod that takes courses together throughout the Ph.D. The degree is 16 courses, and ten core classes need to be completed, with HUM-600 and HUM-618 as prerequisite courses.
Language is a requirement: unless your first language isn't English, you have to demonstrate a research proficiency in a language other than English. The dissertation phase has its own terms. You pay a 3-credit doctoral fee each fall and spring until you defend, which keeps you in part-time status, and you have 7 years from matriculation to defend, official leaves of absence excluded. The college puts the average time to complete at 4 years.
Your dissertation is a scholarly work that you research and write under the guidance of a dissertation committee, which is made up of a mentor and two readers. Writing it isn't the last step, though, because the dissertation phase culminates in an oral defense of the completed thesis, so you have to defend the work aloud once it's written.
6
The University of Texas at Dallas
Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities
Texas
45.0- Public
- Humanities/Humanistic Studies
- Degrees awarded, latest year
- 8
About the Program
Coursework for the Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities is spread across fields on purpose. Of the forty-five semester credit hours of coursework, thirty are organized graduate courses in arts and technology, history, philosophy, literature, and visual and performing arts, and you must take one course from each of three groupings. A course on Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Arts and Humanities is required too, so you can't stay inside one discipline.
Field examinations are the hinge of this degree. You give nine semester credit hours to preparing for them, then sit three written sections and an oral defense before a three-member faculty committee that oversees how your three fields are defined. But you can't schedule the exams until you've met the foreign language requirement. After the exams, a four-person committee oversees the dissertation.
You'll study on campus, full or part time, and the school estimates 5 to 7 years to complete the degree. Admission happens once a year, because doctoral applicants are accepted for the fall semester, with a December 15 deadline. The GRE isn't required. You write a 650-word narrative essay that should be reflective rather than factual, and international applicants need at least 80 on the internet-based TOEFL.
Graduates seek positions such as teacher or educator, researcher, administrator, archivist, writer and museum curator, and the school also names nonprofit management. So the doctorate isn't described as a route into teaching alone. The minimum of 60 semester credit hours includes a required course in Writing for Academic Research, which serves you in any of those roles that depend on research and writing.
7
Georgetown University
Doctor of Liberal Studies
District of Columbia
35.0- Private nonprofit
- Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies
- Degrees awarded, latest year
- 7
About the Program
Twelve courses come before the thesis, 36 credits in total, and the first four are fixed. You take the four foundation courses in sequence during your first four semesters, so the early part of the Doctor of Liberal Studies is the same for everyone. Eight electives follow, and up to three of them can be Directed Readings of 3 credits each. Courses are offered on weekday evenings.
After coursework, the thesis stage starts with exams. Your faculty mentor and the faculty director design two questions for your qualifying exams, written and oral, around your research methodology and the interdisciplinary scope of your thesis. Topics are limited to the liberal arts and social sciences and must be approved by the DLS Director, so a topic outside those fields won't go forward. You finish with a final oral defense in front of the entire thesis committee.
Both a bachelor's and a graduate-level degree are required before you apply, unless you're in the final term of your graduate program. No GMAT or GRE is required, but you do submit 20 pages of academic writing, so have a paper of that length ready. A bibliography doesn't count toward the pages. Applications open September 15, with a final deadline of April 1.
Tuition is charged by the course, at $5,256 per 3-credit course, and the total listed for the degree is $65,664. How quickly you pay it depends on your load. Full-time students typically take 9 credits a semester, while part-time students typically take 3 to 6 credits in the fall and spring, which is 1 to 2 courses.
8
University of Memphis
Tennessee
25.0- Public
- Fully Online Option
- Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies
- Degrees awarded, latest year
- 6
About the Program
Some 20,276 students attend University of Memphis, a public university in Memphis, Tennessee. Federal records file this degree under Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies, which is the heading to look for in the university's own catalog. The program's last federal report shows 6 doctorates conferred, so it is larger than 25 in every 100 programs measured here. Because the whole field awarded 141 doctorates that year, this program's share of them is 4.3%. Nothing in the degree requires attending in person, since it is offered fully online.
9
Montana State University
Montana
15.0- Public
- Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies
- Degrees awarded, latest year
- 4
About the Program
Montana State University is a public university in Bozeman, Montana that enrolls 17,135 students. The university reports this degree as Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies, and the catalog entry will sit under that name or a near variant. Some 4 doctorates were conferred in the last year on record, a bigger output than 15% of the programs ranked alongside it. That output is 2.8% of the 141 doctorates awarded across this field nationally, which is a real share for one program.
10
University of Louisville
Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities
Kentucky
5.0- Public
- Humanities/Humanistic Studies
- Degrees awarded, latest year
- 3
About the Program
Established in 2003 and redesigned in 2013 to put more weight on theoretical and global perspectives, the Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities is set up as a four-year course of interdisciplinary study. Its home is the Department of Interdisciplinary and Public Humanities, but the faculty belong to many departments across the university, which means the interdisciplinary label describes who teaches you as much as what you read. A dual degree that pairs the PhD with a master's in health care ethics is aimed at students building expertise in bioethics or medical humanities.
Two tracks split the degree by what you plan to make of it. Culture, Criticism, and Contemporary Thought is for scholars headed to universities, museums and other employers of doctoral graduates, while Public Arts and Letters is for artists and writers who want to produce literature, art, music, opera, performance or film grounded in intensive scholarship. Because there are no track-specific course requirements beyond the foundation and theory-and-methods courses, picking a track sets where you're pointed more than what you're required to take.
Coursework runs to at least 48 credit hours, so how those hours are laid out matters more than the total. Twelve hours of foundation courses open with a proseminar introducing doctoral study in the global humanities and continue with historical perspectives on arts and culture, then 6 hours of theory and methods cover cultural theory and aesthetic theory. After that the work turns toward your own: nine hours of supervised projects pair a graduate internship with a two-part doctoral project, and 9 hours of dissertation research complete the degree.
Getting in means already holding a master's degree, since all applicants must have completed an MA, MFA, MDiv or another appropriate master's first. Admission is for the fall semester alone and everything must arrive by January 15, so a missed deadline costs a year. You'll write a statement of intent of about 1000 words on your research interests and goals and send a scholarly or creative writing sample, but the GRE is optional. Once in, you'll need basic proficiency in two classical or modern languages besides English, or advanced proficiency in one.
How We Rank
Every eligible program at this level is scored out of 100. Each figure becomes a percentile against the 10 ranked programs, and the percentiles are weighted as below. The methodology page explains each choice.
- Degrees awarded, latest year: 100%. Degrees the program conferred in the latest reported year. The one figure on record that belongs to the program itself.
Reading the cards. Degrees awarded is the number of doctorates the program conferred in the latest year reported to IPEDS. In a program this size that number moves from year to year, so a rank here is a snapshot of one year.
Source: federal IPEDS records for each college, as of September 2026. Scores are this site's own.
What Is a Doctorate in Liberal Studies or the Humanities?
A doctorate in liberal studies or the humanities is a research degree, awarded for a dissertation that draws on more than one discipline, and reported to the federal government as a research doctorate in the same category as a PhD in English or history. You don't earn it to practice anything. You earn it to teach, to write and to carry out research that no single department would house.
Two forms are common, and they suit different lives. The PhD in humanities is run by an interdisciplinary institute or a graduate school and follows the pattern of every other PhD: full-time study, seminars in the day, funding tied to teaching, and a dissertation that takes years. The Doctor of Liberal Studies is the doctoral counterpart of the master's in liberal studies, and programs in that form are scheduled around students who keep working, with evening seminars, short residencies and a dissertation that often grows out of the student's own field. Both are research doctorates on the federal record, so the letters after your name won't tell an employer which one you did. The diploma title and the dissertation will.
The federal classification files these programs under four headings. The humanities heading covers combined studies and research in the humanities subjects, with an emphasis on languages, literatures, art, music, philosophy and religion. The liberal arts and sciences heading covers a structured combination of the arts, sciences, social sciences and humanities. The chart shows how the doctorates split between them.
93 of the 141 doctorates, 66%, sit under the humanities heading. The heading records how the university filed the degree, and two programs filed the same way can be a funded full-time PhD and a part-time doctorate paid by the course. Ask each program for the exact title on the diploma and for its dissertation requirements before you compare anything else.
How Many Doctoral Programs in Liberal Studies and Humanities Are There?
Doctoral programs in liberal studies and humanities number 21 in the country, spread over 16 states and the District of Columbia, on what universities report to IPEDS. Together they conferred 141 doctorates in the latest reported year, and 10 of them conferred 3 or more, which is the bar for being ranked here.
Those 141 degrees are concentrated in a few places. The 10 ranked programs conferred 102 of them, 72% of the field, and 6 programs conferred ten or more. 8 programs conferred fewer than 3, and several conferred one. The chart below is the whole ranked field.
For scale, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences counts 5,110 humanities doctorates awarded in 2022 across every humanities discipline. The programs on this page are the interdisciplinary sliver of that. Most humanities doctorates are earned inside one department, in English, history, philosophy or a language, and if a department is what you want, this list isn't where you'll find it.
Numbers this small change how you choose. With 10 active programs, the deciding question is whether a faculty member works on what you want to study and has finished students before. Geography and rank come second to that, and a program that conferred four doctorates last year can be the right one if the adviser is.
Who Are Doctoral Programs in Liberal Studies and Humanities Built For?
Doctoral programs in liberal studies and humanities are built for two kinds of student: the full-time scholar headed for a faculty career, and the working adult who wants a research doctorate without leaving a job. The field is small enough that you can tell which kind a program serves from its schedule, and you should decide which kind you are before you apply.
Neither kind is young. The median age of new humanities and arts PhDs was 34.2 years in 2020, almost three years above the 31.5 for new doctorate recipients across all fields, and 18% of them were over 40. If you're returning to study after years of work, you'll be in a seminar room with people who did the same.
The programs themselves are small and mostly on campus. The median ranked program confers 9 doctorates a year, 2 of the 21 programs in the field are reported as available fully online, and 10 of the 21 are at public universities against 10 at private nonprofit ones. Small cohorts mean you'll know every faculty member and they'll know your project, which is the main thing a program of this kind has to offer.
Two people should look elsewhere. If you want a tenure-track post in a single discipline, departments advertise and hire by discipline, and a search committee in history will ask where an interdisciplinary dissertation belongs. And if you want a credential that a profession requires, no profession requires this one. The degree is for people who want to do the research and can name the question they'd spend seven years on.
What Is a Doctorate in the Humanities Used For?
A doctorate in the humanities is used, more than anything else, to teach. In 2019, 61% of recently employed humanities PhDs taught at the postsecondary level as their principal job, more than double the 27% share among doctorate holders generally. The rest worked outside the classroom, in libraries and museums among other places, where the degree counts as evidence that you can finish a long piece of independent work.
The teaching market is the hard part, and you should see it before you commit. Of humanities doctorate recipients graduating in 2020, 59% had a firm job or postdoctoral commitment at graduation, against 70% for doctorate recipients in all fields. 47% had a job lined up and 12% a postdoc, and of those with a job in the United States, 70% were going into academic work. So four in ten finished the degree without a firm commitment in hand.
Pay follows the same pattern. In the same federal survey, humanities PhDs had the lowest median annual earnings of doctorate holders in any major academic field in 2019. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences publishes the full set of workforce indicators, and you should read them before you read a program's brochure.
Then ask every program where its graduates of the past five years are working, by employer and by role, and expect a list rather than a sentence. If you're doing a Doctor of Liberal Studies for a job you already hold, ask your employer in writing whether that title counts as a doctorate for pay or promotion, because some salary schedules name the degrees they recognize.
What Does a Doctoral Program in Liberal Studies Involve?
A doctoral program in liberal studies involves three stages: coursework in seminars, comprehensive or qualifying examinations, and a dissertation written under a committee and defended in front of it. The seminars build the range the degree is known for, the examinations test whether you hold it, and the dissertation is the original work the degree is awarded for.
The first two stages take longer in this field than in most. Humanities doctorate recipients spend about four years on coursework and examinations, against two to three in the natural sciences, and then about three years on the dissertation, which is the same in every field. So most of the extra time a humanities doctorate takes is spent before you write a word of the thesis.
Interdisciplinary work adds a step that a single-department doctorate doesn't have. You assemble a committee from more than one field and persuade each member that the project holds together on their terms as well as yours. A program that has done this many times has a process for it, so ask to see the past three years of dissertation titles and who sat on each committee. If the same two faculty members appear on every one, the interdisciplinary range is narrower than the catalog says.
Ask about the requirements the catalog lists in a line and the student lives with for years: whether reading proficiency in a language is required and how it's tested, how many seminars must be taken in each contributing field, and what must be done on campus. A program scheduled for working students will still have residencies, and the dates matter to someone with a job.
How Long Does a Doctorate in Liberal Studies or the Humanities Take?
A doctorate in liberal studies or the humanities takes a median of 6.8 years from the month you start the program to the month the degree is granted, on the Survey of Earned Doctorates figures for humanities and arts recipients graduating in 2020. Doctoral education as a whole ran 5.7 to 5.9 years over the same period, so plan on a year more than a friend in a science program.
Money is the thing that shortens it. Humanities graduates whose main support was their own income took a median of 8.7 years for the classes of 2011 to 2013, while graduates across all fields whose main support was fellowships, grants and assistantships finished in a median of 5.7. The gap between those two medians is three years, over and above the tuition.
Finishing at all is the other number to hold onto. The National Research Council's assessment of doctoral programs found a median completion rate of 42% within eight years for humanities programs, among students who entered between 1996 and 2006. Because the median humanities doctorate then took about ten years, a real share of the students it counted as not finishing did finish later. Read it as a floor, and ask every program for its own completion rate and median time to degree, in writing.
Beyond funding, three things bring the date forward. A master's degree that the program accepts toward its coursework can remove a year of seminars. A dissertation question settled in the first year, rather than after the examinations, means the reading you do for seminars feeds the thesis. And an adviser with a record of getting students out matters more than an adviser with a famous name, so ask how long each faculty member's last three students took.
What Funding Should You Ask a Humanities Doctoral Program About?
Ask a humanities doctoral program about four things before you look at its tuition: whether admitted students receive tuition remission, whether they receive a stipend, how many years both are guaranteed, and what teaching or research work is required in return. The answers change the cost of the degree more than any published rate, and they change how long it takes.
The time cost is the one people miss. Humanities graduates who relied on personal sources of income took a median of 8.7 years to finish, three years longer than the median for graduates across all fields whose main support was fellowships and assistantships. Every unfunded year is a year of tuition and a year of the salary you'd otherwise earn, so an offer with a smaller stipend and a longer guarantee can be worth more than a larger stipend for two years.
A program scheduled for working students, and priced by the credit, calls for a different set of questions. Ask whether any fellowships or assistantships exist at all, whether the program accepts an employer's tuition benefit, and what you're billed during the dissertation years, when you take no classes but remain enrolled. That continuing charge is where the cost of a part-time doctorate quietly grows.
Get the offer in writing. It should say what happens to funding if the dissertation runs past the guaranteed years, whether summer support exists, whether health insurance is included, and how many courses a teaching assistant carries each term. A program that won't put those on paper before you accept is telling you how it handles questions later.
Are Doctoral Programs in Liberal Studies Accredited?
Doctoral programs in liberal studies are accredited through the university that awards them, and only that way, because no agency accredits liberal studies or the humanities as a subject. When a program calls itself accredited, it means the university holds institutional accreditation from an agency the U.S. Department of Education recognizes, and that accreditation covers every degree the university awards, the doctorate included.
Check it yourself in the Department of Education's accreditation database before you send an application fee. Federal student aid is available only where the institution is accredited by a recognized agency, and a committee hiring faculty will look the university up in the same place.
Accreditation also tells you less than it sounds like it should. The Department is direct that it gives no assurance that graduates will be accepted by employers. In a field with no programmatic accreditor, the things that stand in for one are the program's dissertation record and where its graduates went, and both are questions for the program rather than for a database.
One more check belongs here. The count of doctorates a university reports to IPEDS describes a past year, so confirm with the program that it is admitting students for the year you'd start. An accredited university can carry a degree on its books that it has stopped admitting to.
What Should You Ask a Doctoral Program in Liberal Studies Before You Enroll?
Ask a doctoral program in liberal studies seven questions before you enroll, and put them to the director of graduate studies in writing, because the answers are the difference between a six-year degree and a ten-year one.
- Which faculty member would supervise my project, and have they finished students before? A doctorate is an apprenticeship to one person, and an adviser who has never taken a student to a defense is a risk you'd be the first to run.
- What is the funding offer, in full, and for how many years? Tuition remission, stipend, teaching load, summer support and insurance, on paper, because the source of support moves the median time to degree by three years.
- What is your completion rate and median time to degree? The field median completion rate was 42% within eight years in the last national assessment, and a program that knows its own number is a program that watches it.
- Where are your graduates of the past five years working? Employer and role, not a sentence about diverse careers. This is the only outcome that matters and no federal record holds it.
- What must be done on campus, and when? Residencies, examinations and the defense have dates, and a working student needs them a year ahead.
- Will my master's coursework count, and toward what? Credits accepted as electives save nothing. Credits accepted against required seminars save a year.
- What am I billed during the dissertation years? A continuing enrollment charge, multiplied by the three years a dissertation takes, is a real part of the price and rarely appears on the tuition page.
Keep the replies. A program that answers all seven in writing has told you it runs the degree seriously, and a program that answers two of them has told you something as well.
How Were the Best Doctoral Programs in Liberal Studies Ranked?
The best doctoral programs in liberal studies were ranked on one figure, the doctorates each program conferred in the latest year reported to IPEDS, and on nothing else. A program needed at least 3 doctorates in that year to be ranked, which 10 of the 21 met. Each program's count becomes a percentile against those 10, and the percentile is the score.
One figure carries the whole score because it's the only figure on federal record that belongs to the doctoral program itself. The university's graduation rate is left out, because the rate on record follows first-time undergraduates and says nothing about whether doctoral students finish. Tuition is left out too, because the tuition on record is the undergraduate rate, and a doctoral student is either funded or billed by the credit, so the published figure describes nobody on this page.
Read the count for what it shows. A program that confers fifteen doctorates a year has a working pipeline: it admitted students, funded or scheduled them, examined them and got them through a defense, and it did so recently. A program that conferred three did the same at a smaller scale. What the count can't show is whether either is right for your question, so read the list as a map of active programs and not as a verdict on their quality. The methodology page sets out the model in full.
The result is a list in which 5 of the 10 programs are at public universities and the ten together conferred 72% of the field's doctorates. Every program that cleared the threshold is on it, so there is no hidden second tier.
What Does This Ranking of Doctoral Programs Leave Out?
This ranking of doctoral programs leaves out the three things that decide a doctorate: who will supervise you, how you'll be funded, and where the program's graduates went. None of those is reported to the federal government for a program, and the questions in the section above are how you get them.
It also rests on one year of degree counts, and in programs this small a single year is noisy. A program that confers three doctorates one year can confer nine the next because a cohort admitted six years earlier happened to finish together, and its position here would move with it. Treat the order as a reading of which programs are active, and don't treat a gap of two places as a difference in quality.
The online flag is a yes or no. It records that the degree can be completed at a distance and says nothing about how many students do so, or whether the residencies and the defense happen in person. And the count of doctorates includes every graduate of the program, full-time and part-time, funded and self-paying, so a large number doesn't tell you which kind of student the program is built for. Make the choice on the adviser, the funding and the placements, and use this page to know where to ask.
Common Questions About Doctoral Programs in Liberal Studies and Humanities
Is There a Doctorate in General Studies?
What Is a Doctor of Liberal Studies?
Can You Earn a Doctorate in Liberal Studies or Humanities Online?
Which University Awards the Most Doctorates in Liberal Studies and Humanities?
Do You Need a Master's Degree to Enter a Doctoral Program in Liberal Studies?
What Is the Difference Between a PhD in Humanities and a Doctor of Liberal Studies?
How Long Does a PhD in the Humanities Take?
What Jobs Do Humanities PhDs Get?
Where Do the Figures on These Doctoral Programs Come From?
- Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)
- Classification of Instructional Programs, code 24.0103
- Classification of Instructional Programs, code 24.0101
- Overview of Accreditation in the United States, U.S. Department of Education
- Accreditation in the U.S., U.S. Department of Education
- Years to Attainment of a Humanities Doctorate, Humanities Indicators
- The Relationship between Funding and Time to Ph.D., Humanities Indicators
- Attrition in Humanities Doctorate Programs, Humanities Indicators
- The Age of New Humanities Ph.D.'s, Humanities Indicators
- Advanced Degrees in the Humanities, Humanities Indicators
- Occupations of Humanities Ph.D.'s, Humanities Indicators
- Earnings of Humanities Ph.D.'s, Humanities Indicators
- Job Status of Humanities Ph.D.'s at Time of Graduation, Humanities Indicators
- Humanities Indicators: Workforce, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs
The figures on these doctoral programs come from federal records that each university reports about itself, and from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' analysis of federal surveys of doctorate recipients, as of the dates shown.
Show the federal record for all 10 colleges ranked, in 9 states and territories
Southern Methodist University Faulkner University Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts University of California-Merced Salve Regina University The University of Texas at Dallas Georgetown University University of Memphis Montana State University University of Louisville