Social Work is of the hottest bachelor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #24 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 14 schools in the Rocky Mountains Region to determine which ones were the best for social work students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 920 bachelor's degrees in social work during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Social Work School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The social work bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to social work students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other social work 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 much debt social work 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 social work related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for social work 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 Social Work Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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It is hard to beat University of Utah if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in social work. U of U is a fairly large public university located in the medium-sized city of Salt Lake City.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the social work program state that they receive average early career earnings of $38,338.
Colorado State University - Fort Collins is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in social work. Colorado State is a fairly large public university located in the city of Fort Collins.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the social work program state that they receive average early career wages of $38,134.
It is difficult to beat Boise State University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in social work. Located in the midsize city of Boise, Boise State is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Social Work bachelor's degree recipients from Boise State University get an earnings boost of around $2,683 above the average earnings of social work majors.
MSU Denver is a large public university located in the large city of Denver.
Social Work bachelor's degree recipients from Metropolitan State University of Denver get an earnings boost of around $6,572 above the average income of social work majors.
Colorado State University - Pueblo is a medium-sized public university located in the midsize city of Pueblo.
Those social work students who get their bachelor's degree from Colorado State University - Pueblo make $2,299 more than the standard social work graduate.
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 social work bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
