a doctor's degree in geological & earth sciences is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #37 out of 306 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. 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 4 schools in the Far Western US Region to determine which ones were the best for geological & earth sciences students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 190 doctor'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 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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a quality 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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 colleges 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 in the Far Western US Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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University of California - San Diego is a good choice for students pursuing a doctor's degree in geological & earth sciences. UCSD is a fairly large public university located in the city of La Jolla.
Doctorate graduates who receive their degree from the geology program make about $79,645 in the first couple years of working.
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).
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
