Sustainability Science is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #98 most popular master's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 9 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Sustainability Science Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 394 master's degrees in sustainability science to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Sustainability Science School for Your Master's Degree
The sustainability science master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality sustainability science program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 sustainability science students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of sustainability science students who choose to seek a master'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 easy is it for sustainability science to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized sustainability science related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for sustainability science students working on their master'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 Sustainability Science Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
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University of Michigan - Ann Arbor is a wonderful option for students pursuing a master's degree in sustainability science. Located in the midsize city of Ann Arbor, U-M is a public university with a very large student population.
Those sustainability science students who get their master's degree from University of Michigan - Ann Arbor earn $3,947 more than the typical sustainability science grad.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a master's degree in sustainability science. UIUC is a fairly large public university located in the small city of Champaign.
Master's students who receive their degree from the sustainability science program make an average of $55,247 for their early career.
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).
The sustainability science master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality sustainability science program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
