a bachelor's degree in human services is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #68 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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 8 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Human Services Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 276 bachelor's degrees in human services during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Human Services School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The human services bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality human services 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 human services students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of human services students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
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 much debt human services 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 human services related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for human services 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 Human Services Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region 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.
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Indiana Wesleyan University - National & Global is a great decision for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in human services. Located in the rural area of Marion, IWU is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Soon after graduating, human services bachelor's recipients typically earn around $37,366 in their early careers.
It's hard to beat Northern Illinois University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in human services. NIU is a large public university located in the small suburb of Dekalb.
After graduation, human services bachelor's recipients usually earn about $29,062 in the first five years of their career.
Indiana Tech - CPS is a small private not-for-profit college located in the city of Fort Wayne.
Bachelor's recipients from the human services degree program at Indiana Institute of Technology - College of Professional Studies get $3,199 above the standard college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
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).
The human services bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality human services program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
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