Forestry isn't the most popular bachelor's program in the world, but it's not the least popular either. To be more precise it ranks #157 in popularity out of 363 majors in the country. So, you may have to do some digging around to find quality schools that offer the degree program. This list can help with that.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 12 schools in the Southeast Region to determine which ones were the best for forestry students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 458 bachelor's degrees in forestry to qualified students.
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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. 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 take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges 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.
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 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 full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools 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 Southeast Region 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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Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in forestry has to look into North Carolina State University. Located in the large city of Raleigh, NC State is a public university with a very large student population.
Those forestry students who get their bachelor's degree from North Carolina State University earn $17,981 more than the standard forestry graduate.
Virginia Tech is a great decision for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in forestry. Virginia Tech is a fairly large public school located in the city of Blacksburg.
Bachelor's recipients from the forestry program at Virginia Tech get $2,656 above the standard college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
University of Florida is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in forestry. UF is a very large public university located in the city of Gainesville.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the forestry program make an average of $26,838 in the first couple years of their career.
It's difficult to beat Auburn University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in forestry. Located in the city of Auburn, Auburn is a public university with a very large student population.
Those forestry students who get their bachelor's degree from Auburn University earn $8,260 more than the standard forestry grad.
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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
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