Bachelor’s degree · earnings 4 years after completing
Highest-Paying Colleges for Forestry (Bachelor's)
Graduates who complete a bachelor's degree in Forestry earn a median of $58,784 four years after finishing, and the middle half earn between $44,916 and $73,142. We rank the 22 U.S. colleges whose Forestry programs have at least 25 graduates in the Scorecard earnings sample, 1,066 graduates in all. That puts Forestry at #70 of 131 bachelor's degree fields we rank by national median earnings.
North Carolina State University at Raleigh, in North Carolina, leads at $86,357, 47% above the median ranked school ($58,575). Most schools are tightly bunched: the middle half of ranked schools earn between $55,771 and $64,524, and the lowest earns $48,755, so outside the leaders the choice of school moves earnings less than the choice of major. 10 of the 22 ranked schools (45%) match or beat the national median.
Public universities dominate the top 20: 20 public, 0 private nonprofit and 0 for-profit. Across all ranked schools, 100% are public. The top 20 are spread across 18 states, with California the most common (2).
The top 20 schools cost about the same as the rest of the list: a median net price of $17,041 a year, against $16,722 across all 22 ranked schools. Their graduates who borrowed carry a median of $21,000 in federal loans, about 35% of one year of earnings. Measured against a typical high-school graduate in the same state, the median top-20 school recovers its net cost in about 3.1 years.
Showing the top 22 of 22 ranked schools. Select a column heading to re-sort the table. † = fewer than 40 graduates in the earnings sample.
| 1 | North Carolina State University at Raleigh Raleigh, NC Public · 4-year | $86,357 | 94 | $21,750 | $17,303 | 1.3 |
| 2 | California State Polytechnic University-Humboldt Arcata, CA Public · 4-year | $79,849 | 44 | $21,000 | $13,171 | 1.2 |
| 3 | California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo San Luis Obispo, CA Public · 4-year | $77,419 | 27 † | $17,333 | $16,665 | 1.6 |
| 4 | Louisiana Tech University Ruston, LA Public · 4-year | $65,941 | 28 † | $22,083 | $11,864 | 1.5 |
| 5 | Auburn University Auburn, AL Public · 4-year | $64,704 | 31 † | $18,750 | $24,323 | 3.0 |
| 6 | West Virginia University Morgantown, WV Public · 4-year | $64,568 | 35 † | $20,500 | $15,634 | 2.0 |
| 7 | University of Idaho Moscow, ID Public · 4-year | $64,392 | 43 | $16,500 | $14,831 | 2.1 |
| 8 | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA Public · 4-year | $64,204 | 88 | $20,663 | $24,953 | 3.6 |
| 9 | Clemson University Clemson, SC Public · 4-year | $63,764 | 34 † | $22,875 | $22,253 | 3.1 |
| 10 | Colorado State University-Fort Collins Fort Collins, CO Public · 4-year | $62,919 | 29 † | $22,073 | $21,279 | 3.8 |
| 11 | University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Minneapolis, MN Public · 4-year | $58,651 | 66 | $19,500 | $16,778 | 3.2 |
| 12 | Mississippi State University Mississippi State, MS Public · 4-year | $58,499 | 39 † | $19,000 | $17,595 | 2.6 |
| 13 | Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College Tifton, GA Public · 4-year | $57,678 | 40 | $20,065 | $6,842 | 1.1 |
| 14 | SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry Syracuse, NY Public · 4-year | $57,664 | 40 | — | $18,952 | 3.5 |
| 15 | University of Maine Orono, ME Public · 4-year | $56,124 | 34 † | $23,269 | $17,510 | 3.9 |
| 16 | Michigan Technological University Houghton, MI Public · 4-year | $55,912 | 32 † | $25,500 | $14,182 | 2.7 |
| 17 | University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Stevens Point, WI Public · 4-year | $55,724 | 104 | $21,393 | $14,559 | 3.2 |
| 18 | Michigan State University East Lansing, MI Public · 4-year | $55,724 | 28 † | $29,362 | $19,680 | 3.8 |
| 19 | Iowa State University Ames, IA Public · 4-year | $52,650 | 47 | $18,750 | $18,589 | 4.8 |
| 20 | Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ Public · 4-year | $52,191 | 35 † | $22,698 | $14,158 | 3.6 |
| 21 | Southern Illinois University-Carbondale Carbondale, IL Public · 4-year | $50,394 | 80 | $20,500 | $13,297 | 3.7 |
| 22 | University of Florida Gainesville, FL Public · 4-year | $48,755 | 68 | $15,500 | $6,541 | 1.8 |
How this ranking is built
A school appears here only if it meets every condition below.
- Which programs count
- Main campuses only, one entry per institution. Scorecard reports program outcomes for the whole six-digit federal ID (OPEID6), so branch campuses share their parent’s numbers and are not listed twice.
- Only bachelor's degree programs in Forestry (CIP 0305, the four-digit code Scorecard uses to group related programs).
- At least 25 graduates in the earnings sample. Smaller samples are left out because their medians swing too much and the counts carry a little privacy noise.
- A major gets a page only when at least 20 schools qualify. This one has 22.
- Ranked by median earnings 4 years after completing, highest first. Ties go to the larger sample, then to the school name.
- Schools missing earnings or a sample size are left out rather than estimated.
- What the numbers mean
- Earnings: median annual earnings of graduates four years after completing. The cohort completed in academic years 2017-18 and 2018-19 and was measured in calendar years 2022 and 2023, in 2024 dollars.
- Who is counted: graduates who received federal student aid (Title IV grants or loans), and only those who were working and not enrolled in more school that year. Graduates without federal aid, those who went on to further study and those with no earnings are not in the median.
- Scorecard adds privacy noise to counts and medians and hides values it cannot protect, so a gap of a few percent between two schools is not meaningful.
- Graduates: the number of graduates in that earnings sample. A † marks fewer than 40, where the figure is less precise.
- Debt: median federal loan debt (Stafford and Grad PLUS loans disbursed at that school) of graduates who borrowed, from the 2018-19 and 2019-20 completers. Parent PLUS and private loans are not included.
- Net price: average yearly cost after grants and scholarships for the whole institution, not this major, academic year 2023-24.
- Payback: 4 years of net price divided by how much these earnings exceed a high-school graduate’s in the school’s state. Shown only when that gap is at least $2,000, the same formula as the rest of the site.
- Source: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard field-of-study data, June 2026 release.
Top states for Forestry earnings
No state has enough ranked schools for a state comparison.
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