a bachelor's degree in area studies is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #85 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 5 schools in the Plains States Region to determine which ones were the best for area studies students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 193 bachelor's degrees in area studies during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Explore societal similarities and differences as seen through cultural, biological, archaeological and linguistic lenses when you earn one of your degrees in anthropology from Southern New Hampshire University.
Choosing a Great Area Studies School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of area studies for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. 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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this 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 many resources a school devotes to area studies students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of area studies students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
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 area studies 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 area studies related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for area studies students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Area Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that 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.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "ethnic-cultural-gender-studies//area-studies"
Explore societal similarities and differences as seen through cultural, biological, archaeological and linguistic lenses when you earn one of your degrees in anthropology from Southern New Hampshire University.
It is hard to beat Washington University in St Louis if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in area studies. WUSTL is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Saint Louis.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the area studies program earn an average of $30,716 in the first couple years of working.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in area studies needs to look into University of Missouri - Columbia. Located in the city of Columbia, Mizzou is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the area studies degree program at University of Missouri - Columbia make $11,644 more than the standard college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
St Olaf College is a wonderful decision for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in area studies. Located in the distant town of Northfield, St. Olaf is a private not-for-profit college with a small student population.
Area Studies bachelor's degree recipients from St Olaf College earn a boost of about $3,117 above the average earnings of area studies 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).
Your choice of area studies for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. 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:
