History Degrees in Illinois

In August 1908 a white mob spent three days attacking Black residents of Springfield, looting homes and businesses and lynching two men, Scott Burton and William Donegan. It happened a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln’s house. Six months later, in February 1909, a group including Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, and Moorfield Storey founded the organization that became the NAACP, explicitly in response. The site was designated a national monument in August 2024, which means the whole sequence is now preserved, argued over, and taught within a mile of itself. Teaching it is something Illinois does at unusual depth, including at a level only a handful of states reach.

Illinois has 44 colleges and universities offering history degrees, with 95 programs among them: 59 bachelor’s degrees, 24 master’s degrees, and 12 doctorates.

Seven of those schools carry history at all three levels, and one of them offers a doctorate in public history, which only four other states can say.

Top History Schools in Illinois

We scored all 44 Illinois schools on the four factors we use in every state: history degree offerings and program variety (40%), student outcomes (25%), reputation (20%), and affordability (15%). Urbana-Champaign and Loyola Chicago tie for depth at 6 programs each. Outcomes belong to the private universities, with Chicago at 96% and Northwestern at 95% completing in four years. Reputation rests on four R1 institutions. Affordability is where the public campuses claw back ground, with Northern Illinois at $13,248 and Southern Illinois Carbondale at $13,334 against private tuition four times higher. Here are Illinois’s best history degrees.

Most Affordable History Degrees in Illinois

Annual in-state tuition and fees. All ten are public, and every one of them except Governors State teaches history at the master’s level or beyond. The band from $12,004 to $15,264 is narrow, but it is a high floor by national standards.

History Education in Illinois

Illinois is expensive at the bottom. The cheapest history degree in the state costs $12,004 a year, which is more than the most expensive school on the affordability lists for Florida, Texas, or California. There is no genuinely cheap option here, and the compensation is that the mid-priced public universities are unusually strong: Northern Illinois carries a history doctorate at $13,248 and Southern Illinois Carbondale at $13,334.

Private colleges carry more of the field than public ones, 32 institutions running 57 programs against 12 publics running 37, but the distribution of levels runs the other way. Graduate work concentrates in a small number of places. Seven schools teach history at all three levels, which is more than every state except California, New York, Texas, and Massachusetts.

Public history is Illinois’s national card. Eight of its programs carry a public history designation, behind only Pennsylvania and level with North Carolina, and Loyola Chicago runs both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Public History. A public history doctorate exists in only five states in the country. Northern Illinois adds a public history master’s at a fraction of Loyola’s tuition, so the state offers the field at two very different price points.

Chicago itself is part of the argument for studying here. The Newberry Library has been free and open to the public since 1887 and holds five million manuscript pages, the Chicago History Museum has been collecting since 1856, and UIC and Loyola both sit inside that. For a student who intends to do archival research rather than only read about it, proximity is a practical advantage rather than a romantic one.

Transfer runs through the Illinois Articulation Initiative, which is among the broadest arrangements in the country: more than 100 participating colleges and universities agree to accept a completed General Education Core Curriculum package in place of their own lower-division requirements. The package is 12 to 13 courses, 37 to 41 semester credits, across five categories. Faculty panels also articulate coursework for specific majors. Details are at the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

Online provision is thin at 5 programs, three bachelor’s and two master’s, and none of the eight ranked schools offers one. Our guide to online history degrees covers the wider field.

Becoming a History Teacher in Illinois

Illinois is one of the few states where a history graduate takes a history exam. Rather than bundling the field into one social studies credential, Illinois splits social science into six separate content tests: history, economics, geography, political science, psychology, and sociology and anthropology. The one you want is Social Science: History, test code 315.

That is a meaningfully different arrangement from most states. Pennsylvania issues a single Social Studies 7-12 certificate covering fourteen-odd subjects down to personal finance, and Florida’s exam devotes only two of six competencies to history. In Illinois the content test matches the major.

The credential itself is the Professional Educator License with a content-area endorsement. Alongside the content test you need the Assessment of Professional Teaching, and the Test of Academic Proficiency unless your SAT or ACT scores exempt you.

Six Illinois history programs in our directory are built with teaching in mind, including Urbana-Champaign’s optional secondary education track inside the history bachelor’s, and Illinois State’s department is shaped around classroom preparation.

Confirm current requirements with the Illinois State Board of Education before choosing a program.

History Careers in Illinois

Employment and wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, 2025. The employment count for historians was withheld, though the wage was reported.

Illinois sits close to the national median in most of this table, which is unusual. Postsecondary history teaching is within a fraction of a percent of national, and curators are within a percent below. Secondary school teaching is the clear premium at 11% above, and archivists are the clear discount at 8% below.

Historians are the outlier at 17% above the national median, though the BLS withheld the employment count, so there is no way to say how many such jobs the state actually supports. Treat the wage as real and the market size as unknown.

The 200 archivist positions are worth weighing against the state’s archival training. Urbana-Champaign runs a history and information science master’s aimed at exactly that work, and Chicago holds some of the largest collections in the country, but the counted employment is modest. As elsewhere, the classroom carries almost all of the volume with 44,670 secondary teaching positions.

History Resources in Illinois

• Newberry Library, Chicago. An independent research library founded in 1887 and free to the public ever since, holding over 1.5 million books, 5 million manuscript pages, and 500,000 historic maps. Its collections in early American and Indigenous history draw researchers nationally.
• Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield. The most visited presidential library in the country, with more than 500,000 visitors a year and over 12 million items, including the former Illinois State Historical Library collection.
• Chicago History Museum, founded 1856 and the city’s oldest cultural institution, holding more than 20 million items.
• Illinois State Archives, Springfield, which preserves more than 75,000 cubic feet of state and local government records.

Frequently Asked Questions