About This Site

Choosing an emergency management degree is hard for a specific reason. The programmatic accreditor this field has, CAEMHSE, is young and held by very few programs, so there is no usable list of approved degrees to work from and no obvious way to tell a serious one from a thin one. This site exists to fill that gap with federal data and the schools' own published material, rather than with opinion.

How A Program Gets Onto This Site

The starting point is federal, not editorial. Every program here is enumerated from IPEDS by its CIP classification, which is how the U.S. Department of Education categorizes degrees, so the list is not curated by us and no school can be added by asking. For emergency management that means CIP 43.03: homeland security, crisis and emergency and disaster management, critical infrastructure protection, and terrorism studies.

From there, each program's page on its own institution's website is located and read. That page is what the written profiles are built from, and it is linked from every card so you can check any claim against the source. If we could not read a school's page for a program, that program's card carries the verified federal data without a written profile rather than a description assembled from guesswork.

We currently hold 91 bachelor's programs across 83 schools in 34 states. 87 are scored; 4 report too little to score and are shown without a rank.

What We Check That Most Sites Do Not

Occupation codes, not field averages. Program catalogs often carry a blended salary figure covering several occupations a degree might lead to. Quoting one of those as the pay for a specific job is a common and invisible error. Every wage figure here is taken from a single BLS occupation code, 11-9161, Emergency Management Directors, from the May 2025 release: a median of $93,330 across 13,500 jobs, published with its full percentile spread rather than the midpoint alone.

Third-party claims stay attributed. School pages frequently quote wage figures, growth projections and ranking placements from elsewhere, sometimes years out of date. Those are not restated here as our findings. Where a page's own claim is worth repeating, it is attributed to the school.

No projections at all. Our wage source is a survey of what employers currently pay. It contains no forecast of future employment, so no page here tells you how fast the field is expected to grow.

What We Will Not Do

• No school pays for a position, and none has been offered one.
• No reputation surveys. Nobody is polled about which programs they respect.
• No invented figures. If a number is on this site it came from IPEDS, from BLS, or from the school's own page, and the source is linked.
• No filling gaps with estimates. A program that does not report enough is shown without a score rather than assigned a low one, because a low score would imply we measured it.

The methodology page sets out the scoring model in full, including what each number actually measures and where its limits are.

The Editor

Taylor Rupe is the founder and editor of emergencymanagementprograms.com. He holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Washington Seattle and a B.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University, and works as a software engineer.

He built the pipeline behind this site. Every institution reporting a CIP 43.03 program to IPEDS was checked against that school's own program listings, the wage figures come from the May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release for 11-9161, and programs whose pages could not be confirmed were dropped rather than published on federal data alone.

He is not an emergency manager, and this site publishes no operational or career advice. What it does is make the public record on emergency management degrees comparable, and show its work.

This site is commercial, and the footer says how it makes money. What it does not do is let that decide the order. The model runs on public data, the weights are published, and no school can pay to move. If the ranking is worth anything to you, it is because you can check it, so everything it rests on is on the site: the sources, the weights, and the page each figure was read from.

Corrections

Programs change, tuition changes, and federal data is republished annually. Every card links the page it was written from, so a disagreement is usually settled in a minute. If something is wrong, write to help@hakia.com with the program and the figure. Corrections are made to the underlying data, which changes the score, rather than to the wording around it.

How This Site Makes Money

This site may receive compensation when readers request information from or enroll in programs featured here. Sponsored placements are labeled. Accreditation status, wage data, and program structure data are sourced directly from official records and are reported the same way regardless of partnership status.