Plant Sciences is about average in terms of popularity for master's degrees programs. That is, it ranks #143 out of the 343 majors across the country that we analyze each year. So, you may have to do some digging around to find quality schools that offer the degree program. This list can help with that.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 26 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for plant sciences students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 612 master's degrees in plant sciences during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Plant Sciences School for Your Master's Degree
The plant sciences master'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 master'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 include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination 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 master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master'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 plant sciences students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other plant sciences students want to attend this school to pursue a master'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 plant sciences students go into to obtain their master'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 plant sciences related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for plant sciences students working on their master's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Plant Sciences Master's Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Iowa State University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a master's degree in plant sciences. Iowa State is a very large public university located in the small city of Ames.
Master's recipients from the plant sciences program at Iowa State University earn $14,181 above the average graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in plant sciences needs to look into University of Florida. UF is a very large public university located in the medium-sized city of Gainesville.
Plant Sciences master's degree recipients from University of Florida earn a boost of about $7,731 above the typical earnings of plant sciences majors.
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).