Astronomy & Astrophysics is about average in terms of popularity for bachelor's degrees programs. That is, it ranks #168 out of the 363 majors across the country that we analyze each year. So, you may have to do some digging around to find quality schools that offer the degree program. This list can help with that.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for astronomy & astrophysics students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 105 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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor'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 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 full 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 Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
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The University of Texas at Austin is a good option for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in astronomy & astrophysics. UT Austin is a very large public university located in the large city of Austin.
After graduating, astronomy bachelor's recipients usually earn about $29,404 in the first five years of their career.
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.
by our College Data Analytics Team
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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
