a bachelor's degree in wildlife management is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #139 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 5 schools in the Plains States Region to determine which ones were the best for wildlife management students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 138 bachelor's degrees in wildlife management to qualified students.
Develop a broad-based interdisciplinary skill set to solve complex environmental problems like climate change, alternative energy and sustainability with a specialized online degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
Choosing a Great Wildlife Management School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The wildlife bachelor'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 bachelor'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 school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of different 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 bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor'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 wildlife management students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of wildlife management students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
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 bachelor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized wildlife management related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for wildlife management 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 Wildlife Management Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Develop a broad-based interdisciplinary skill set to solve complex environmental problems like climate change, alternative energy and sustainability with a specialized online degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
South Dakota State University is a great decision for individuals interested in a bachelor's degree in wildlife management. Located in the remote town of Brookings, South Dakota State is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the wildlife management program at South Dakota State University make $3,642 above the average graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
Bemidji State University is a good option for students interested in a bachelor's degree in wildlife management. Bemidji State University is a small public university located in the remote town of Bemidji.
Soon after graduation, wildlife bachelor's recipients generally make an average of $35,806 in their early careers.
Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in wildlife management has to check out Missouri State University - Springfield. Missouri State is a very large public university located in the medium-sized city of Springfield.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the wildlife program make around $26,549 for their early career.
Valley City State University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in wildlife management. Valley City State University is a small public university located in the town of Valley City.
Those wildlife management students who get their bachelor's degree from Valley City State University earn $8,412 more than the typical wildlife student.
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).