Natural Resource Management is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #127 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 4 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Natural Resource Management Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 388 master's degrees in natural resource management during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Natural Resource Management School for Your Master's Degree
The resource management master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. 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 account for this we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection 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 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 natural resource management students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other natural resource management students want to attend this school to pursue a master'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 natural resource management 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 natural resource management related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for natural resource management students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Natural Resource Management Schools
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Natural Resource Management Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Learn to fit environmental standards into your business practices when you earn your sustainability and environmental compliance MBA at Southern New Hampshire University.
Every student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in natural resource management needs to take a look at Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech is a fairly large public school located in the city of Blacksburg.
Natural Resource Management master's degree recipients from Virginia Tech get an earnings boost of approximately $10,264 above the average earnings of natural resource management graduates.
Every student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in natural resource management needs to take a look at Duke University. Duke is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Durham.
Those natural resource management students who get their master's degree from Duke University make $8,878 more than the average resource management graduate.
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).