If you pursue a bachelor's degree in accounting, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #8 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 23 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Accounting Bachelor's Degree Schools in Michigan ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 1,365 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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a bachelor'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 consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 schools for accounting students working on their bachelor'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 Accounting Bachelor's Degree Schools in Michigan list, to help you choose the best school for you.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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Michigan State University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in accounting. Michigan State is a fairly large public university located in the small city of East Lansing.
Those accounting students who get their bachelor's degree from Michigan State University receive $12,176 more than the standard accounting graduate.
It's difficult to beat Grand Valley State University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in accounting. GVSU is a fairly large public university located in the fringe town of Allendale.
Soon after graduating, accounting bachelor's recipients typically earn an average of $51,186 in the first five years of their career.
Western Michigan University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in accounting. WMU is a large public university located in the city of Kalamazoo.
Soon after graduating, accounting bachelor's recipients typically make an average of $47,464 in their early careers.
Oakland University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in accounting. Located in the large suburb of Rochester Hills, Oakland is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Accounting bachelor's degree recipients from Oakland University earn a boost of around $6,044 over the average income of accounting graduates.
Hope is a small private not-for-profit college located in the small city of Holland.
Accounting bachelor's degree recipients from Hope College receive an earnings boost of approximately $7,331 over the typical earnings of accounting graduates.
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).