When it comes to popularity, a bachelor's degree in forestry sits in the middle of the road, ranking #157 out of 363 majors in the country. So, it might take a little more work to find colleges and universities that offer the degree program.
College Factual looked at 5 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Forestry Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 160 bachelor's degrees in forestry during the 2022-2023 academic year.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Sustainability (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.7
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Sustainability (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" REJECTED (relevance 0.7)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Science & Engineering Bachelors Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Science & Engineering Bachelors Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Science & Engineering Diploma Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Science & Engineering Diploma Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Sustainability & Environmental Management (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Sustainability & Environmental Management (I Have a Bachelors)" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: Checking offer "MBA - Sustainability & Environmental Management (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "MBA - Sustainability & Environmental Management (I Have a Bachelors)" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: Checking offer "" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 2
DEBUG: relevant_offers > 0, checking for ESYOH offers
DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 1 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.8
DEBUG: esyoh_offers count = 1
DEBUG: ESYOH offers found, rendering ESYOH widget
DEBUG: most_relevant_only = true, filtering for most relevant
DEBUG: Found 1 offers with relevance >= 1.0
Choosing a Great Forestry School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The forestry bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality forestry 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 bachelor'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 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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor'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 many resources a school devotes to forestry students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other forestry 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 forestry 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 forestry related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for forestry 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 Forestry Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "natural-resources-conservation//forestry"
It's difficult to beat University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in forestry. UW - Stevens Point is a moderately-sized public university located in the distant town of Stevens Point.
After graduation, forestry bachelor's recipients typically earn around $41,177 in the first five years of their career.
It is difficult to beat Michigan State University if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in forestry. Michigan State is a fairly large public university located in the city of East Lansing.
After graduating, forestry bachelor's recipients generally earn around $39,178 at the beginning of their careers.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in forestry needs to look into Purdue University - Main Campus. Located in the city of West Lafayette, Purdue is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Forestry bachelor's degree recipients from Purdue University - Main Campus earn a boost of about $2,158 above the typical earnings of forestry majors.
Michigan Technological University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in forestry. Michigan Tech is a medium-sized public university located in the town of Houghton.
Forestry bachelor's degree recipients from Michigan Technological University earn a boost of about $4,700 over the typical income of forestry 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).
The forestry bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality forestry program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
.jpg){kind=link}