Biotechnology is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #89 most popular master's degree program in the country. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in the Great Lakes Region to determine which ones were the best for biotechnology students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 167 master's degrees in biotechnology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Biotechnology School for Your Master's Degree
The biotech 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 quality 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 biotechnology students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other biotechnology 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 biotechnology 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 biotechnology related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for biotechnology students working on their master's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Biotechnology Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Northwestern University is a great option for students interested in a master's degree in biotechnology. Located in the city of Evanston, Northwestern is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
Master's students who receive their degree from the biotech program make around $75,972 in their early career salary.
It's hard to beat University of Wisconsin - Madison if you want to pursue a master's degree in biotechnology. UW - Madison is a fairly large public university located in the large city of Madison.
Students who graduate with their master's from the biotech program report average early career income of $78,060.
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
The biotech 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:
