You'll be studying one of the lesser sought-after majors if you pursue a Master's Degree in natural resources & conservation. It is ranked #23 out of 37 major degree programs in terms of popularity. As such, your educational options may be more limited than if you were in a more popular field.
College Factual looked at 6 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Natural Resources & Conservation Master's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 550 master's degrees in natural resources & conservation during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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)" ACCEPTED (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)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 11
DEBUG: relevant_offers > 0, checking for ESYOH offers
DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 6 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.5
DEBUG: esyoh_offers count = 6
DEBUG: ESYOH offers found, rendering ESYOH widget
DEBUG: most_relevant_only = true, filtering for most relevant
DEBUG: Found 0 offers with relevance >= 1.0
DEBUG: Backfilling with 0 offers with relevance >= 0.9
DEBUG: Backfilling with 4 offers with relevance >= 0.8
Choosing a Great Natural Resources & Conservation School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of natural resources & conservation for getting your master's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 include 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.
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 many resources a school devotes to natural resources & conservation students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other natural resources & conservation 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 much debt natural resources & conservation students go into to obtain their master's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized natural resources & conservation related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for natural resources & conservation students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Natural Resources & Conservation 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 Resources & Conservation Master's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "natural-resources-conservation"
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
Your choice of natural resources & conservation for getting your master's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
(NRCS_Photo_Gallery).jpg){kind=link}