If you plan on getting your master's degree in natural resource management, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #127 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 2 schools in the Far Western US Region to determine which ones were the best for natural resource management students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 85 master's degrees in natural resource management during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Natural Resource Management Master's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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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.
Oregon State University is a great choice for students interested in a master's degree in natural resource management. Located in the city of Corvallis, Oregon State is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Natural Resource Management master's degree recipients from Oregon State University get an earnings boost of approximately $2,622 above the average income of natural resource management majors.
University of Hawaii at Manoa is one of the best schools in the country for getting a master's degree in natural resource management. Located in the city of Honolulu, UH Manoa is a public university with a fairly large student population.
After graduating, resource management master's recipients typically earn about $49,408 in the first five years of their 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).
