If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in animal science, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #64 in the country in terms of popularity. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
College Factual looked at 9 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Animal Science Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 874 bachelor's degrees in animal science to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Animal Science School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The animal science bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on animal science students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other animal science students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt animal science students go into to obtain their bachelor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized animal science related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for animal science students working on their bachelor's degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Animal Science Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
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Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in animal science has to check out Michigan State University. Michigan State is a very large public university located in the small city of East Lansing.
Bachelor's recipients from the animal science program at Michigan State University get $4,303 more than the typical college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in animal science has to take a look at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. UIUC is a fairly large public university located in the small city of Champaign.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the animal science program report average early career wages of $30,187.
University of Wisconsin - Madison is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in animal science. UW - Madison is a fairly large public university located in the large city of Madison.
Animal Science bachelor's degree recipients from University of Wisconsin - Madison receive an earnings boost of around $7,365 above the typical income of animal science graduates.
Purdue University - Main Campus is a wonderful choice for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in animal science. Located in the small city of West Lafayette, Purdue is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the animal science program report average early career earnings of $35,318.
Located in the town of Platteville, UW - Platteville is a public university with a moderately-sized student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the animal science degree program at University of Wisconsin - Platteville get $7,967 more than the average college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).