Anthropology is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #59 most popular bachelor's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 4 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Anthropology Bachelor's Degree Schools in Iowa ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 102 bachelor's degrees in anthropology to qualified students.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Anthropology (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 1
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Anthropology (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" ACCEPTED (relevance 1)
DEBUG: Checking offer "BA in Anthropology" with relevance 1
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "BA in Anthropology" ACCEPTED (relevance 1)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Science & Engineering Bachelors Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Science & Engineering Bachelors Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Science & Engineering Diploma Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Science & Engineering Diploma Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 2
DEBUG: relevant_offers > 0, checking for ESYOH offers
DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 1 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.8
DEBUG: esyoh_offers count = 1
DEBUG: ESYOH offers found, rendering ESYOH widget
DEBUG: most_relevant_only = true, filtering for most relevant
DEBUG: Found 1 offers with relevance >= 1.0
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. 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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of various 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 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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges 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 Iowa 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.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "social-sciences//anthropology"
University of Iowa is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in anthropology. Located in the small city of Iowa City, Iowa is a public university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the anthropology program earn an average of $27,221 in the first couple years of their career.
Iowa State University is a great decision for students interested in a bachelor's degree in anthropology. Iowa State is a fairly large public university located in the small city of Ames.
After graduation, anthropology bachelor's recipients generally earn about $25,014 in their early careers.
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
