 The highest paying science degrees, that's what we're gonna be talking about today. But before we jump into that, make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers and opportunities that are gonna lead you to success. We also talk about how you can avoid some of the common financial traps that so many people fall for. Now if you're new here and you haven't done it already and that sounds like something that interests you, go ahead and smash the subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss an opportunity. Now with that out of the way, let's jump right into it. I've already talked about these degrees that I think are best in science. I've made several different videos about that. And in those videos, I considered all kinds of different things like job satisfaction, job growth, opportunity, salary, work life balance, all kinds of different things like that. But I've been getting tons of requests to do the same thing for all different types of degrees, but focused solely on salary. And I guess that makes sense because this is technically a personal finance channel. So in this video, I'm gonna be going over degrees in science that pay really, really well, AKA they lead to careers that have very high salaries. Number 10 on the list starting right away is going to be neuroscience. Now this is gonna be the science that's gonna be all about dealing with the structure and the function of the nervous system as well as the brain. Now at this degree, you can expect to make around 47,000 a year in your first five years after graduating. And then after 10 years, so 10 years and after also known as mid-career pay, you're gonna make around $80,000. Now there's a ton of different career paths that you could go down with this. One of them would be medical scientists. They make around $88,000 a year. There's 138,000 jobs available. And it's growing at 6%, which is pretty good. That means over the next 10 years, there's gonna be 8,400 jobs that pop up. Now neuroscience is a relatively flexible degree, especially for a science degree. There's a lot of different paths that you can go down. For instance, you could go into medicine. You could go into research and development. There's also a lot of different tech positions within labs you could go into. Now one thing about this degree that I like to mention that I think maybe skews the data just a little bit into making it seem a little bit better than it actually is, is the fact that a lot of smart people tend to go into neuroscience. You see this with certain degrees where people that would probably be successful no matter what degree they get end up going into these certain types of degrees just because they're really smart and that's something that interests them. And so they end up making more money after graduating, but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the degree. I suspect that neuroscience probably falls into this category, at least to some extent. Number nine on the list is going to be a geology degree. So geology is gonna be all about the study of the origin, history, structure, and function of the surface of the earth. Now with a geology degree, you can expect to make around 48,000 a year starting out and mid-career pay is gonna be 89,000. One career path you could go down would be geoscientists and they make around $92,000 a year. There's 31,000 jobs available and it's growing at 5%, which is faster than average, meaning over the next 10 years there's gonna be 1,600 new jobs that pop up. Now with a geology degree, you could go into the mining industry, for instance, that would be one option you could go into. You could also go into the natural gas industry. Natural gas industry tends to be extremely well-paying at pretty much every position that you look at, whether you're looking at like engineers, petroleum engineers, making a ridiculous amount of money, or if you're looking down at lower levels where you've got like technicians or people who work with their hands, even they make really good money. However, I will say about a geology degree, it can be very difficult to get a job, especially your first job right out of college. In order to get a job, you'll likely have to move somewhere. So if you're somebody who doesn't wanna have to move, this might not be a good choice for you. Number eight on the list is going to be a food science degree. And food science is basically just, you know, the basic science and the applied science of food. It's gonna be all about the science of food. Everywhere we go, there's free food. So you're gonna be studying all the way from agriculture, for instance. So figuring out how to make more crops grow or figuring out how to make the crops immune to different pests. All the way through nutrition, food safety, food processing, being able to, you know, mass produce food that's safe. So all kinds of things that are related to food. With this one, you can expect to make around $49,000 a year starting off in 88,000 in mid-career pay. So one career path you could go down is you could become an agricultural or food scientist. They make around $65,000 a year. There's 34,000 jobs available. It's growing at 6%, which is faster than average, meaning over the next 10 years, there's gonna be 2,000 jobs that open up. Now, if you're somebody who's a foodie, you're someone who's completely obsessed with food, maybe this would be a great career for you to go down. There are plenty of jobs in food science. Unfortunately, like many science-related jobs, you'll probably have to move somewhere, especially when you're trying to get your foot in the door and get your first job. Now, remember a few years back, I actually took a trip to Atlanta, where I went to the Coca-Cola factory and you're basically get to go kind of behind the scenes and see how they make Coca-Cola, how they figure out which types of sodas taste the best. It was really cool and there were a bunch of food scientists that worked there and their job was basically to make flavors that are really good that people will love and want to buy. Number seven on the list is going to be chemistry. Now, I think everybody knows what chemistry is all about. It's basically the properties, structures, functions of all kinds of different substances. With a chemistry degree, you can expect to make around 49,000 a year starting out and mid-career pay is 93,000. One career path that you could go down with a chemistry degree would be a chemist or a material scientist. They make around $78,000 a year. There's 93,000 jobs available. It's growing at 5%, which is faster than average, meaning over the next 10 years, there's gonna be 4,300 jobs that pop up. Now, compared to a lot of other science degrees, your job prospects are gonna be relatively good with a chemistry degree. There are quite a few career paths that you could go down. You might have to move in order to land your first job, but once you get your foot in the door, you should be good to go and you can move pretty much anywhere you want after you've got that first few years of experience. This is also one of those science degrees where you might be able to actually get a job without having to go to grad school. With a lot of the science degrees, you end up having to go back to school, get a master's or sometimes even a doctorate in order to land a really good career. With chemistry, as long as you do your due diligence, you plan things out, you should be able to land a job with just a bachelor's degree. Number six on the list is going to be molecular biology. So molecular biology is mostly concerned with the activity that happens within a cell as well as between different cells. With this one, you can expect to make around $50,000 a year starting out at 97,000 in mid-career pay. One career path you could go into is you could become a microbiologist. They make around $75,000 a year. It's growing at 3%, which is about average. And over the next 10 years, that means there's gonna be around 600 new jobs that pop up. Now with this one, in my opinion, it's a little bit too specific, a little bit too niche. You might end up pigeonholing yourself and not being able to get certain jobs that you might have been able to get if you got just like a biology degree or a biochemistry degree. So what I recommend if you go for a degree like this is you wanna supplement your classes that you take at your college with a lot of mathematics and statistics. This will probably give you the best chance of being able to land a job with just a bachelor's degree, but there's always that option of going back and getting a master's degree and then you're gonna have a lot more opportunities. But you guys always know that I recommend on this channel going for degrees where you can get a job with just a bachelor's degree. And then at that point, if you wanna go on, get a master's or a PhD, that's great. But at least it's not something that you have to do. It's something that you want to do. It's an option, not something that you absolutely have to do just because you don't have any other choice. Number five on the list is going to be biochemistry. Now this one is basically just the combination of biology and chemistry. It's gonna be chemistry with an emphasis on living organisms. With this degree, you can expect to make around 47,000 a year starting out and 95,000 in mid-career pay. One career path you could go down is becoming a biochemist and they make around $94,000 a year. There's 34,000 jobs available and it's growing at 4%, which is about average, which means over the next 10 years there's gonna be 1,400 jobs that pop up. Unfortunately, this is one of those careers where you'd have to get a doctoral or a professional level degree, so you probably wouldn't be able to get into it with just a bachelor's. However, biochemistry, in my opinion, is much more flexible than just a biology or a chemistry degree alone. It's gonna open a lot of doors for you that you probably wouldn't have with the other two. And if you're somebody who's really got your mindset on biology or chemistry, you just really love one of those two subjects, I would recommend probably going for a biochemistry degree because I think it's a little bit better. Number four on the list is going to be pharmaceutical science. So this one is gonna be all about researching and designing new drugs. With a pharmaceutical science degree, you can expect to make around $50,000 a year starting out and 107,000 in mid-career pay. Now, you would likely work in the pharmaceutical industry and there would be quite a few different jobs you could go for within that industry. One of them would be becoming a chemical or material scientist where you could make around $78,000 a year. There's 93,000 jobs available and it's growing at 5%, which is slightly faster than average, meaning over the next 10 years there's gonna be an employment change of around 4,300. Now, I think it goes without saying this one is obviously extremely niche, extremely specific. So if you know exactly what you wanna do, you want to go for a career within the pharmaceutical industry, this could be a good degree for you to pursue. However, if you're not 100% sure that that's what you wanna do, you probably wanna go for a degree that's a little bit more general. Not that many people graduate this degree every year, so it's probably throwing off the statistics a little bit. I do believe that I use the best sources that are available when it comes to the numbers that I give out on this channel. However, when you don't have that many people who graduate, that's gonna throw off the final statistics just because you don't have a large enough sample size. Number three on the list is going to be physics. Now, this is gonna be the science that is concerned with the nature and property of matter and energy. Now, with this degree, you can expect to make around $62,000 a year starting out at 113,000 in mid-career pay. Now, one career path you could go down is you could become a physicist or an astronomer. They make around 122,000 a year. There's 20,000 jobs available. It's growing at 7%, which is faster than average, meaning over the next 10 years, there's gonna be 1,400 new jobs that pop up. However, this one does require a doctorate usually. But with a physics degree, I will say that there are a lot of other career opportunities out there, and this is one of those degrees where you will very likely be able to get a job with just a bachelor-level degree. You will actually see physics majors who graduate and get a degree work in all kinds of different industries and completely unrelated jobs. And the reason for this is because a lot of hiring managers have the philosophy where they basically wanna just hire really, really smart people and then they can kinda teach them how to do the job. Whereas some other hiring managers have the philosophy that they wanna hire somebody who's very specialized in that specific skill set. These are two different philosophies, but a lot of different companies will have one or the other. And when you graduate with a physics degree that is basically proof that you're almost like a borderline genius because this is one of the hardest degrees that you can possibly get. So for instance, you see a lot of physics majors going into software engineering, software development, and becoming coders. So almost in the same way that an engineering degree is just widely respected by all kinds of different industries and companies out there, same thing goes for a physics degree. But being fair here, you could also say that people who are smart enough to get a physics degree likely would have been successful no matter what they went into. So you have to ask yourself whether that's correlation or causation. And to be honest with you, it's probably a little bit of both. Number two on the list is going to be a cognitive science degree. Now this is a very rare degree. There's not that many people who graduate with this one every year, but you can expect to make around $64,000 a year starting out and 121,000 in mid-career pay. Now this is a very rare degree, but I think the reason people who graduate with this one are paid so well is because it really focuses on machine learning and AI and automation. So they're basically kind of, you know, figuring out how the brain works. That's the cognitive science part, but they're also trying to figure out how you can kind of replicate that with technology. So one career path you could go down would be a computer and information research scientist. They make around $122,000 a year. There's 32,000 jobs available. It's growing at 15%, which is much faster than average, meaning over the next 10 years, there's gonna be 5,000 new jobs that pop up. Now with this one, you do wanna make sure that you have a very good idea of what career that you're going for, because depending on what career you're going for, you're gonna want to kind of specialize in those types of skills that are gonna be good for that particular job. The reason for that is because this is such a complicated subject. I mean, think about how complicated the human brain is. It might be the most complicated thing in the entire universe. And so studying this for four years, you're probably not gonna get everything down, and then you're also trying to replicate it. This is a very difficult task to do. You have to know so many different things. You have to be good at psychology, philosophy, mathematics, user interface, user design, advanced software engineering, like machine learning and AI. There's no way that in just four years, you're gonna be able to take a deep dive into any of these one subjects, so it is a little bit general. With that being said, if you know what career you're going for, you can take extra classes and that particular skill set that you're gonna need for those types of jobs. Number one on the list is going to be aerospace science slash aerospace studies. Now this is gonna be one of those few exceptions to the rule that I tell you all about, which is don't go for a degree that has the word studies in it. Now aerospace studies is gonna be similar to like aerospace engineering, but it's gonna be more focused on the science side of things. So they're gonna be more focused on studying aerospace related things, whereas engineers are gonna be more focused on solving problems. Now with an aerospace degree, you can expect to make around $50,000 a year starting out and a whopping 130,000 in mid-career pay. Now this is one where you would basically major in it to become a rocket scientist, like literally a rocket scientist. And of course, there aren't that many jobs out there for rocket scientists. I couldn't find that on BLS for instance. This is a very rare degree, not that many people graduate with it, but the closest career to what you would actually end up doing would be an aerospace engineer. Aerospace engineers make around 116,000 a year. There's 66,000 jobs available. It's growing at 3%, which is about average, meaning over the next 10 years, there's gonna be 1,900 jobs that open up. Now one thing that I wanna mention, I did mention this a few times in the video, but a lot of these degrees don't have that many graduates. And so for that reason, the data is probably not very accurate. That's one thing that I've run into over and over again on this channel is people ask me about a certain degree and it's pretty hard for me to give them accurate information just because of the fact that maybe only 50 or 100 people graduate with that degree every single year. Generally speaking, it's better to go for degrees where there's a lot of graduates just because of the fact that hiring managers and bosses are gonna be more familiar with their degree and they're gonna know what they're getting when they hire you. So I've been working on this project over the last few months. This is an extremely exciting project. I even hired someone to help me with it because it was so much work. And basically I took all of the best information all across the internet that I could find that's available and I put it all in one spreadsheet to create the degree ranking system. This is the college degree ranker. Nothing has ever been done like this before. So with this particular version, version 1.1, I focused on salary and demand. So salary is pretty obvious. That's gonna be how much money you make with a particular degree. Demand is a little bit more difficult. It's gonna be how many people are hiring those who graduate with particular majors, particular degrees. In the future, I'm gonna add more to make it even more accurate, like for instance, job satisfaction, flexibility, how difficult the degree itself is, all kinds of things like that. But for now, I do believe that this is the most accurate list that has ever been created. You can check that out in my Patreon down in the description below if you're interested in seeing it. That's gonna be version 1.1, but I will be updating it in the future and I'm also gonna be adding all kinds of exclusive content that are things that you guys ask for. Now, if you haven't done it already, go ahead and smash the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera, that you have on the video. And before you leave, make sure to check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.