General Biology is of the hottest doctor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #19 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in California to determine which ones were the best for general biology students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 186 doctor's degrees in general biology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great General Biology School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of general biology for getting your doctor's degree school matters. 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
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of various 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 doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 - The number of general biology students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
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 much debt general biology students go into to obtain their doctor'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 general biology related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for general biology students working on their doctor'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 General Biology Doctor's Degree Schools in California list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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University of California - San Diego is a great option for students pursuing a doctor's degree in general biology. Located in the city of La Jolla, UCSD is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Soon after graduating, biology doctorate recipients usually make around $80,294 at the beginning of their careers.
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.
Your choice of general biology for getting your doctor's degree school matters. 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:
