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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 13 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Geological & Earth Sciences Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 463 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
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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
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
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 the Southwest Region 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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Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences has to take a look at Texas A&M University - College Station. Texas A&M College Station is a very large public university located in the city of College Station.
Soon after graduation, geology bachelor's recipients generally earn about $44,585 in their early careers.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences needs to take a look at University of Arizona. University of Arizona is a very large public university located in the city of Tucson.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the geology program report average early career earnings of $38,617.
Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences needs to take a look at The University of Texas at Austin. UT Austin is a fairly large public university located in the large city of Austin.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the geology program report average early career income of $42,062.
Located in the city of Lubbock, Texas Tech is a public university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the geological & earth sciences major at Texas Tech University make $5,480 more than the average graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
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).