Astronomy & Astrophysics isn't the most popular bachelor's program in the world, but it's not the least popular either. To be more precise it ranks #168 in popularity out of 363 majors in the country. So, it might take a little more work to find colleges and universities that offer the degree program.
College Factual reviewed 4 schools in the Middle Atlantic Region to determine which ones were the best for bachelor's degree seekers in the field of astronomy & astrophysics. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 164 bachelor's degrees in astronomy & astrophysics during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Astronomy & Astrophysics School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The astronomy bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. 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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges 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.
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 astronomy & astrophysics students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other astronomy & astrophysics 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 easy is it for astronomy & astrophysics to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized astronomy & astrophysics related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for astronomy & astrophysics students working on their bachelor'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 Astronomy & Astrophysics Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region list to help you make the college decision.
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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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.