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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 17 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Geological & Earth Sciences Bachelor's Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 552 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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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.
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
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.
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 Geological & Earth Sciences Bachelor's Degree Schools in California 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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University of California - Santa Barbara is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences. Located in the suburb of Santa Barbara, UCSB is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the geology program make an average of $30,759 for their early career.
University of California - Davis is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences. Located in the suburb of Davis, UC Davis is a public university with a very large student population.
Geological & Earth Sciences bachelor's degree recipients from University of California - Davis get an earnings boost of approximately $5,100 over the average earnings of geological & earth sciences majors.
University of California - Santa Cruz is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences. UC Santa Cruz is a large public university located in the small city of Santa Cruz.
Bachelor's recipients from the geological & earth sciences program at University of California - Santa Cruz make $5,000 more than the average college grad with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
Located in the small suburb of San Luis Obispo, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is a public university with a very large student population.
Those geological & earth sciences students who get their bachelor's degree from California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo receive $10,127 more than the typical geology graduate.
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).