a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #80 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual looked at 8 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Geological & Earth Sciences Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 274 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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 college'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.
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 bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 complete 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 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 Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences needs to look into University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. UMN Twin Cities is a fairly large public university located in the city of Minneapolis.
Bachelor's recipients from the geological & earth sciences program at University of Minnesota - Twin Cities get $2,424 above the average college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
Iowa State University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in geological & earth sciences. Iowa State is a very large public university located in the small city of Ames.
Those geological & earth sciences students who get their bachelor's degree from Iowa State University receive $7,749 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).
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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
