2025 Best Physical Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in Virginia
2Colleges in Virginia
130Doctor's Degrees
a doctor's degree in physical sciences is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #7 out of 36 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 2 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Physical Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 130 doctor's degrees in physical sciences during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their doctor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their doctor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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 physical sciences students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other physical 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 easy is it for physical sciences to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized physical sciences related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for physical sciences students working on their doctor'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 Physical Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in Virginia list to help you make the college decision.
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
