Ranked #15 in popularity, economics is one of the most sought-after bachelor's degree programs in the nation. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 16 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Economics Bachelor's Degree Schools in Texas ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,446 bachelor's degrees in economics during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Economics School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of economics for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality economics 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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account 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 economics students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other economics students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
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 economics 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 economics related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for economics 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 Economics Bachelor's Degree Schools in Texas list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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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Rice University is a great option for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in economics. Located in the large city of Houston, Rice is a private not-for-profit university with a moderately-sized student population.
Economics bachelor's degree recipients from Rice University get an earnings boost of around $25,709 above the typical earnings of economics majors.
Texas A&M University - College Station is a wonderful decision for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in economics. Texas A&M College Station is a very large public university located in the medium-sized city of College Station.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the economics program report average early career earnings of $49,738.
Southern Methodist University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in economics. SMU is a large private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Dallas.
Those economics students who get their bachelor's degree from Southern Methodist University make $18,525 more than the typical economics graduate.
The University of Texas at Austin is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in economics. UT Austin is a fairly large public university located in the city of Austin.
Bachelor's recipients from the economics program at The University of Texas at Austin earn $5,612 more than the average college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
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).