History Degrees in Arizona

Starting around AD 200, Hohokam farmers in the Salt and Gila river valleys dug what is reckoned to be the largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere, roughly a thousand miles of canal in total, though never all running at once. They did it with handheld tools and no draft animals. The point worth holding onto is that Phoenix did not replace that system so much as inherit it: modern Arizona canals follow many of the original alignments, and some of those routes are close to two thousand years older than the city sitting on top of them. The state’s history departments are fewer than you would expect, and they deliver the subject in a strikingly modern way.

Arizona has 6 colleges and universities offering history degrees, with 19 programs among them: 10 bachelor’s degrees, 7 master’s degrees, and 2 doctorates.

Eight of those nineteen programs are online, one of the highest proportions in the country.

Top History Schools in Arizona

Only six schools in Arizona offer history at all, so we publish the top three instead of a longer list. Our scoring uses the same four factors as every state we cover: history degree offerings and program variety (40%), student outcomes (25%), reputation (20%), and affordability (15%). Arizona State leads on depth with 6 programs to Arizona’s 5. Outcomes are level, with Arizona State and Arizona both completing 68% of students in four years. Reputation separates the two R1 universities from Northern Arizona. Affordability barely moves anything, since all three sit between $12,223 and $13,926. Here are Arizona’s best history degrees.

Most Affordable History Degrees in Arizona

Most affordable history degrees in Arizona

Rank	School	Program	Tuition per year
1	The University of Arizona Global Campus	Bachelor's in History	$11,960
2	Arizona State University	B.A. in History	$12,223
3	Northern Arizona University	B.A. in History	$13,009
4	University of Arizona	B.A. in History	$13,926
5	Grand Canyon University	B.A. in History	$17,850
6	Ottawa University-Surprise	Bachelor's in History	$35,880

Annual in-state tuition and fees. This is every school in Arizona that offers a history degree, not a top ten, because six is the whole field. The four public institutions fall between $11,960 and $13,926.

History Education in Arizona

Arizona is the most concentrated history market of any large state. Six institutions teach the subject, four of them public, and those four carry 14 of the state’s 16 programs. The two private colleges offer one program each. There is no long tail of small liberal arts departments here of the kind that fills out the numbers in Pennsylvania or Tennessee, and the practical effect is that the choice is genuinely between three public universities.

What Arizona lacks in breadth it makes up in distance access. Seven of its sixteen programs are online, 44% of everything on offer, which is the highest proportion of any state in the country. New Hampshire is next at 39%. For contrast, Georgia has one online history program across ninety-nine. Arizona State runs three of the seven, and the University of Arizona Global Campus is an entirely online institution. A student anywhere in the country who wants to study history at a distance has more reason to look at Arizona than at most states with five times the programs.

The specialties are unusual for a state this size. Arizona State’s M.A. in World War II Studies is a master’s degree named for one war, which we have not found anywhere else, and it sits alongside a military and veterans studies track in the bachelor’s and a museum studies art degree. The University of Arizona takes the opposite approach, running history and art history in conventional form to the doctoral and master’s level respectively.

Transfer is where Arizona is genuinely better than most states. The Arizona General Education Curriculum is up to 35 credit hours, taught at every community college in the state, with each course needing a C or better. Complete it with a 2.5 GPA or higher and you are guaranteed admission to all three public universities, Arizona State, Northern Arizona, and the University of Arizona, with general education requirements 100% satisfied. That is a stronger guarantee than most: North Carolina guarantees admission to one university in its system, not a chosen campus, and Tennessee’s equivalent excludes its flagship altogether. Arizona guarantees all three. Details are at AZTransfer.

Becoming a History Teacher in Arizona

Arizona issues a Secondary Certificate for grades 6 through 12, and subject-matter testing runs through the Arizona Educator Proficiency Assessments and the NES exams used alongside them.

Arizona offers one route no other state we have examined provides. The subject-matter exam can be waived. For social studies, along with science, mathematics, and English, three years of full-time teaching experience in grades 9 through 12 qualifies a candidate for a waiver of the AEPA or NES content test. For someone already teaching on a different credential, or coming in from another state with classroom experience behind them, that removes a step everywhere else treats as mandatory.

Confirm current requirements with the Arizona Department of Education before choosing a program, since the test list and the waiver conditions are revised periodically.

History Careers in Arizona

History Careers in Arizona

Occupation	Arizona jobs	Arizona median	vs. U.S. median
Secondary school teachers	21,190	$58,360	-19%
Postsecondary history teachers	150	$97,430	+16%
Curators	150	$63,510	+0.1%
Archivists	not published	$47,010	-27%
Historians	not published	not published	n/a

Employment and wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, 2025. Arizona’s figures for historians were withheld entirely, and the archivist employment count was withheld although the wage was reported.

Arizona’s table is thinner than most because the Bureau suppressed more of it, which happens where the sample is too small to publish reliably. What is here divides sharply.

Postsecondary history teachers earn $97,430, 16% above the national median, which is a genuinely strong figure, but there are only 150 such positions in the state. Curators sit at $63,510, level with national to within a rounding error, also across 150 jobs. Those are small markets paying competitively.

Archivists are the outlier at $47,010, 27% below national, and the Bureau did not publish how many there are. Secondary school teaching runs 19% under national across 21,190 positions, and that is where essentially all of the employment is.

The honest summary for an Arizona student is that the specialist roles pay reasonably and barely exist, while the classroom offers the jobs at below-average pay. The state’s unusual strength in online provision means the degree itself need not tie you to that market.

History Resources in Arizona

• Arizona Historical Society, a state agency that runs museums in four separate cities: Flagstaff, Yuma, Tempe, and Tucson. Its research holdings are spread across those sites rather than gathered in one building, and range from recorded interviews and family papers through to institutional records and photography. Work out which site holds what before making the trip.
• Arizona Archives Online, a free searchable database describing archival collections held in repositories across the state. Given how dispersed Arizona’s holdings are, this is the practical first stop for locating material before making a trip.
• Arizona Memory Project, the state library’s digital collections portal, which puts a large amount of Arizona material online without a visit.

Frequently Asked Questions