a bachelor's degree in cognitive science is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #117 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 27 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for cognitive science students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 2,797 bachelor's degrees in cognitive science during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Cognitive Science School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of cognitive science for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality cognitive science program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 cognitive science students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other cognitive science students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor'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 much debt cognitive science 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 cognitive science related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for cognitive science students working on their bachelor'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 Cognitive Science Bachelor's Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Stanford University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in cognitive science. Located in the suburb of Stanford, Stanford is a private not-for-profit university with a large student population.
Those cognitive science students who get their bachelor's degree from Stanford University make $57,784 more than the average cognitive science student.
University of Pennsylvania is a wonderful option for students interested in a bachelor's degree in cognitive science. UPenn is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Philadelphia.
Bachelor's recipients from the cognitive science program at University of Pennsylvania earn $36,403 above the average graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
University of California - Berkeley is a good choice for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in cognitive science. Located in the midsize city of Berkeley, UC Berkeley is a public university with a very large student population.
Cognitive Science bachelor's degree recipients from University of California - Berkeley get an earnings boost of about $16,648 above the typical earnings of cognitive science graduates.
Located in the large suburb of Medford, Tufts is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Cognitive Science bachelor's degree recipients from Tufts University earn a boost of approximately $27,761 above the typical earnings of cognitive science 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.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).