If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in physics, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #62 in the country in terms of popularity. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 8 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Physics Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 361 bachelor's degrees in physics during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Physics School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The physics bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality physics program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 many resources a school devotes to physics students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other physics 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 physics 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 physics related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for physics students working on their bachelor'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 Physics Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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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It is difficult to beat University of Colorado Boulder if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in physics. CU - Boulder is a fairly large public university located in the medium-sized city of Boulder.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the physics program earn about $41,874 for their early career.
It's hard to beat University of Utah if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in physics. U of U is a very large public university located in the city of Salt Lake City.
Soon after graduation, physics bachelor's recipients typically earn around $38,748 in the first five years of their career.
Colorado State is a very large public university located in the city of Fort Collins.
Physics bachelor's degree recipients from Colorado State University - Fort Collins get an earnings boost of about $5,027 above the typical earnings of physics graduates.
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 physics bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality physics program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
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