a bachelor's degree in anthropology is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #59 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 36 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Anthropology Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 971 bachelor's degrees in anthropology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Anthropology School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of anthropology for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality anthropology program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 college'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.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 anthropology students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of anthropology 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 much debt anthropology students go into to obtain their bachelor'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 anthropology related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for anthropology 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 Anthropology Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list to help you make the college decision.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
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It is difficult to beat Northwestern University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in anthropology. Located in the city of Evanston, Northwestern is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the anthropology major at Northwestern University earn $7,007 above the average college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
It's hard to beat University of Michigan - Ann Arbor if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in anthropology. Located in the city of Ann Arbor, U-M is a public university with a fairly large student population.
After graduating, anthropology bachelor's recipients typically make around $24,079 in their early careers.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in anthropology has to check out Ohio State University - Main Campus. Located in the large city of Columbus, Ohio State is a public university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the anthropology program earn about $28,172 for their early career.
Michigan State is a very large public university located in the city of East Lansing.
Bachelor's recipients from the anthropology program at Michigan State University earn $2,416 above the average college graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
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).