Geological & Earth Sciences is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #80 most popular bachelor's degree program in the country. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
College Factual looked at 5 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Geological & Earth Sciences Bachelor's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 112 bachelor's degrees in geological & earth sciences to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Geological & Earth Sciences School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The geology bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality geology program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 good 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.
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 geological & earth sciences students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of geological & earth sciences students who choose to seek a bachelor'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 geological & earth sciences 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 geological & earth sciences related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for geological & earth sciences students working on their bachelor's degree.
More Ways to Rank Geological & Earth Sciences Schools
The geology school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Geological & Earth Sciences Bachelor's Degree Schools in Virginia.
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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James Madison University is a great choice for students interested in a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences. Located in the small city of Harrisonburg, JMU is a public university with a very large student population.
After graduating, geology bachelor's recipients generally make an average of $48,118 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.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
by our College Data Analytics Team
The geology bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality geology program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
