You'll be studying one of the lesser sought-after majors if you pursue a Master's Degree in wildlife management. It is ranked #208 out of 343 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 7 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Wildlife Management Master's Degree Schools ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 228 master's degrees in wildlife management to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Wildlife Management School for Your Master's Degree
The wildlife 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. 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 quality 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 host of different 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 much a school focuses on wildlife management students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other wildlife 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 wildlife 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 wildlife management related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for wildlife management students working on their master'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 Wildlife Management Master's Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
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It's hard to beat Clemson University if you want to pursue a master's degree in wildlife management. Located in the midsize suburb of Clemson, Clemson is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Soon after graduation, wildlife master's recipients usually earn about $47,819 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).