Ranked #31 in popularity, general biology is one of the most sought-after master's degree programs in the nation. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 5 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best General Biology Master's Degree Schools in Missouri ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 199 master's degrees in general biology to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great General Biology School for Your Master's Degree
The biology master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality biology program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a master'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 include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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 master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 general biology students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other general biology students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
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 easy is it for general biology to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized general biology related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for general biology students working on their master'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 General Biology Master's Degree Schools in Missouri list to help you make the college decision.
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It's difficult to beat Washington University in St Louis if you want to pursue a master's degree in general biology. WUSTL is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Saint Louis.
General Biology master's degree recipients from Washington University in St Louis get an earnings boost of about $19,375 above the typical income of general biology graduates.
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.
The biology master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality biology program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
