Geological & Earth Sciences is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #37 most popular doctor's degree program in the country. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual reviewed 15 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for doctor's degree seekers in the field of geological & earth sciences. Combined, these schools handed out 766 doctor's degrees in geological & earth sciences to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Geological & Earth Sciences School for Your Doctor's Degree
The geology doctor'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor'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
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 doctor'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 much debt geological & earth sciences students go into to obtain their doctor'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 schools for geological & earth sciences students working on their doctor'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 Geological & Earth Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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It is difficult to beat University of California - San Diego if you want to pursue a doctor's degree in geological & earth sciences. UCSD is a very large public university located in the large city of La Jolla.
Students who graduate with their doctorate from the geology program state that they receive average early career earnings of $79,645.
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).