Ranked #8 in popularity, accounting is one of the most sought-after bachelor's degree programs in the nation. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in South Dakota to determine which ones were the best for accounting students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 146 bachelor's degrees in accounting to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Accounting School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The accounting bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality accounting program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of various 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 accounting students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other accounting 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 easy is it for accounting to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized accounting related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for accounting 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 Accounting Bachelor's Degree Schools in South Dakota 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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Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in accounting needs to look into University of South Dakota. USD is a moderately-sized public university located in the town of Vermillion.
Accounting bachelor's degree recipients from University of South Dakota get an earnings boost of about $11,346 above the average earnings of accounting majors.
Northern State University is a wonderful decision for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in accounting. Located in the town of Aberdeen, NSU is a public university with a small student population.
Those accounting students who get their bachelor's degree from Northern State University earn $5,351 more than the average accounting student.
University of Sioux Falls is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in accounting. University of Sioux Falls is a small private not-for-profit university located in the city of Sioux Falls.
Bachelor's recipients from the accounting major at University of Sioux Falls make $3,437 more than the typical graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
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 accounting bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality accounting program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
