2023 Editor’s Top Selections: The Best Organizational Leadership Bachelor’s Degrees in the Nation

The tenets of organizational leadership revolve around the idea that good leaders aren’t born, but made. You can be taught all the skills and techniques that you need to step up and take charge in any sort of organization.

Featured Programs:

Sponsored School(s)

Arizona State University - Online

Featured Program: Organizational Leadership, BA; Organizational Leadership (Project Management), BA; Business (Global Leadership), BA

Request Info

Southern New Hampshire University

Featured Program: BS Business Administration with concentration in Organizational Leadership

Request Info

But still, there’s something about people that are called to leadership roles. You probably have a certain kind of drive. You have high standards, and you don’t settle for second best.

When you are starting out on the path to that organizational leadership education, chances are you are going to want to get it at the best possible university you can find.

This is precisely where our editor’s selection of the best universities offering organizational leadership undergrad degrees comes in.

Our Method for Selecting the Top Organizational Leadership Bachelor’s Programs in the Country

First-rate doesn’t mean monolithic. Our selections represent a diverse range of majors, specializations, and leadership philosophies to ensure you find an option that isn’t just the best—but also the best fit for your individual leadership goals.

What we look at are the core qualities, the thing that can make a degree great no matter what the subject or the theory behind it. You’ll find all of these in every program on the list.

Excellent Instructors With Real-world Experience and Academic Expertise

Maybe the most important quality in any education program is who is teaching it. Instructors with the right empathy, communication skills, and command of the material are absolutely crucial.

When you are learning leadership, you need to learn it from an experienced leader.

The schools we selected all have professors who can draw on a deep well of academic training and research experience. They have the material down cold, often because they investigated and developed the theories and evidence themselves.

And they often have genuine experience in the real world, working in organizations and taking on leadership roles themselves. With the benefit of that experience, they have valuable lessons to pass along that will give you an edge in your own education.

Genuine Industry and Community Connections

Leadership and the business environment aren’t fixed in stone. They evolve, and good schools learn to evolve with them. That means keeping ties to organizations in the community, particularly for programs that offer highly specialized concentrations, like healthcare or business management.

This gives you all kinds of opportunities to engage with real-world leadership problems, working on projects with other students or instructors. It means you have built-in networking, too, to help you line up that all-important first job after you graduate from your bachelor’s program. And it means the lessons you learn will be relevant, and proven in the field.

Resources and Support To Get You to Your Leadership Goals

Something you’ll learn fast about organizational leadership is that it’s a collaborative effort. No one carries the whole load alone. You need a team to support you along the way.

So every one of these schools has top-notch academic advising and career counseling services to support you through the bachelor’s program and keep you on track. They also have extensive research libraries, with case studies and other vital material to fuel your studies. And they have wide, multi-disciplinary studies available, with key expertise in fields like psychology, management, and communication that go into organizational leadership excellence.

Wide Recognition and Reputation in Academic and Leadership Rankings

Of course, a school with all these qualities doesn’t go unnoticed out in the world of employers looking for leaders. A great organizational leadership program will turn out some consistently great leaders. And that means word will get around, both in the world of academia and out among organizations where these leaders take charge.

So the schools on this list have a sterling reputation within the community. They often show up on ratings and reviews from other major evaluation agencies like U.S. News & World Report or The Princeton Review. And in cases where they are eligible to receive it, most of them hold a specialty accreditation from agencies that evaluate scholastic and professional preparation programs in various fields.

Helping You Make the Right Choices Among the Top Organizational Leadership Bachelor’s Degree Programs

Evaluating leadership training programs is a challenge. By its nature, the art of leadership is imprecise and evocative, dependent as much on innate characteristics as formal knowledge. You can put two students through exactly the same program and find the different philosophies and leadership emphases will resonate with one but not the other.

Just knowing that this list has the top organizational leadership bachelor’s programs in the country isn’t the end of the story, of course. Ultimately, you’re going to have to pick just one of them. So while we have absolute confidence in every school and degree listed on this page, we’re also giving you the information you need to start narrowing down your choices to only the best of the best – for you.

For starters, we’re putting all the schools together grouped by state, so you can find something close to home.

We also give you the basic rundown on the details of the institution itself: