Best Education schools
Graduate schools of education. Teacher licensure is state- or country-bound, so a highly ranked school in the wrong jurisdiction may not lead to a licence where you intend to teach.
Before the ranking matters
- Licensure is jurisdictional
- If you intend to teach, the programme must be approved in the state or country where you'll be licensed. Research-oriented degrees typically don't confer a teaching licence at all.
- Research degree or practitioner degree
- A PhD trains researchers; an EdD or MEd trains practitioners and school leaders. These sit in the same rankings while serving very different careers.
- Prior classroom experience is often expected
- Leadership and policy programmes frequently expect several years of teaching, and some doctoral tracks effectively require it.
These rank programmes, not universities. A school's band here is independent of its university's overall position on this site — professional schools admit separately, are funded separately, and are ranked by different publications on different criteria. Where a row shows a university rank too, treat the two numbers as answering different questions.
Consensus band across US News Best Education Schools for the US tier, and QS/THE Education for the international tier. Positions are bands, never a single publication's exact number for a single year (2025–26 rankings cycle). Coverage stops at the well-documented top tier; absence means outside that tier, not unranked.
Starring a row saves the university to your shortlist, since that's the level the rest of this site works at. Standalone graduate schools with no undergraduate institution here can't be starred.