If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #80 in the country in terms of popularity. 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 3 schools in Illinois to determine which ones were the best for geological & earth sciences students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 101 bachelor's degrees in geological & earth sciences during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Geological & Earth Sciences School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of geological & earth sciences for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. 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
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on geological & earth sciences students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other geological & earth sciences students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for geological & earth sciences 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 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.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Geological & Earth Sciences Bachelor's Degree Schools in Illinois ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that 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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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences. Located in the city of Champaign, UIUC is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the geology program state that they receive average early career wages of $38,867.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences needs to check out University of Illinois at Chicago. UIC is a very large public university located in the city of Chicago.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the geology program earn about $37,280 in the first couple 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).
Your choice of geological & earth sciences for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. 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.
