Fire Protection isn't the most popular bachelor's program in the world, but it's not the least popular either. To be more precise it ranks #147 in popularity out of 363 majors in the country. So, it might take a little more work to find colleges and universities that offer the degree program.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 7 schools in the Great Lakes Region to determine which ones were the best for fire protection students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 235 bachelor's degrees in fire protection during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Fire Protection School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of fire protection for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality fire protection 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
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 take this into account we include 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 fire protection students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other fire protection students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor'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 fire protection 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 fire protection related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for fire protection students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Fire Protection Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that 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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Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in fire protection has to look into Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Located in the town of Carbondale, SIUC is a public university with a large student population.
Those fire protection students who get their bachelor's degree from Southern Illinois University Carbondale receive $32,854 more than the average fire protection student.
Every student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in fire protection needs to look into Purdue University Global. Purdue University Global is a very large public university located in the small city of West Lafayette.
Fire Protection bachelor's degree recipients from Purdue University Global get an earnings boost of approximately $18,459 over the average income of fire protection majors.
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.