If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #13 in the country in terms of popularity. 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 502 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 52,252 bachelor's degrees in parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies to qualified students.
DEBUG: offers_url is valid, proceeding to fetch data
DEBUG: No offers_data.offers found, showing generic ESYOH widget
Choosing a Great Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality parks & rec program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies 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 parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "parks-recreation-fitness"
DEBUG: offers_url is valid, proceeding to fetch data
DEBUG: No offers_data.offers found, showing generic ESYOH widget
ADBLOCK #171
Best Schools for Bachelor’s Students to Study Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies in the United States
Learn about the top ranked colleges and universities for parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies students seeking a a bachelor's degree. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
DEBUG: offers_url is valid, proceeding to fetch data
DEBUG: No offers_data.offers found, showing generic ESYOH widget
Remaining Award Winners
This section shows the remainder of the schools awarded a Best Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools badge.
Showing in this list means the school was ranked in the top 20% of the 502 different United States parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies schools we analyzed.
Here are some additional great schools for Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies students that almost earned our Best Parks, Recreation, Leisure, & Fitness Studies Bachelor's Degree Schools award.
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).
Your choice of parks, recreation, leisure, & fitness studies for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality parks & rec program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
