Associate degree · earnings 4 years after completing
Highest-Paying Colleges for Biology (Associate)
Graduates who complete a associate degree in Biology earn a median of $44,758 four years after finishing, and the middle half earn between $27,517 and $65,127. We rank the 21 U.S. colleges whose Biology programs have at least 25 graduates in the Scorecard earnings sample, 1,113 graduates in all. That puts Biology at #14 of 27 associate degree fields we rank by national median earnings.
Houston City College, in Texas, leads at $58,846, 28% above the median ranked school ($45,916). The gap between schools is moderate: the middle half of ranked schools earn between $39,198 and $49,919, and the lowest earns $31,657. 11 of the 21 ranked schools (52%) match or beat the national median.
Public universities dominate the top 20: 20 public, 0 private nonprofit and 0 for-profit. Across all ranked schools, 100% are public. Texas places 5 schools in the top 20, ahead of California (4).
The top 20 schools cost about the same as the rest of the list: a median net price of $5,776 a year, against $5,737 across all 21 ranked schools. Their graduates who borrowed carry a median of $9,837 in federal loans, about 21% of one year of earnings. Measured against a typical high-school graduate in the same state, the median top-20 school recovers its net cost in about 1.2 years.
Showing the top 21 of 21 ranked schools. Select a column heading to re-sort the table. † = fewer than 40 graduates in the earnings sample.
| 1 | Houston City College Houston, TX Public · 4-year | $58,846 | 59 | $11,150 | $5,737 | 0.5 |
| 2 | Austin Community College District Austin, TX Public · 4-year | $54,363 | 54 | $7,875 | $6,390 | 0.7 |
| 3 | San Antonio College San Antonio, TX Public · 4-year | $51,424 | 117 | $8,000 | $4,585 | 0.6 |
| 4 | College of Western Idaho Nampa, ID Public · 4-year | $50,658 | 32 † | $13,375 | $8,500 | 1.2 |
| 5 | San Diego City College San Diego, CA Public · 4-year | $50,465 | 43 | — | $7,935 | 1.2 |
| 6 | San Diego Mesa College San Diego, CA Public · 4-year | $49,919 | 86 | — | $5,814 | 0.9 |
| 7 | Mott Community College Flint, MI Public · 2-year | $49,548 | 65 | $10,763 | $5,687 | 0.8 |
| 8 | San Diego Miramar College San Diego, CA Public · 4-year | $48,980 | 55 | — | $3,337 | 0.6 |
| 9 | Rowan College of South Jersey-Gloucester Campus Sewell, NJ Public · 2-year | $48,136 | 91 | $9,837 | $12,378 | 2.2 |
| 10 | Northwest Vista College San Antonio, TX Public · 4-year | $47,186 | 62 | $7,000 | $4,525 | 0.7 |
| 11 | University of Cincinnati-Main Campus Cincinnati, OH Public · 4-year | $45,916 | 30 † | $17,500 | $25,648 | 5.2 |
| 12 | College of Southern Nevada Las Vegas, NV Public · 4-year | $44,428 | 26 † | — | $6,615 | 1.8 |
| 13 | College of Southern Idaho Twin Falls, ID Public · 4-year | $43,435 | 26 † | — | $6,095 | 1.8 |
| 14 | Antelope Valley Community College District Lancaster, CA Public · 4-year | $42,705 | 29 † | — | $3,860 | 1.3 |
| 15 | CUNY Kingsborough Community College Brooklyn, NY Public · 2-year | $40,533 | 63 | — | $5,606 | 2.3 |
| 16 | Holyoke Community College Holyoke, MA Public · 2-year | $39,198 | 31 † | $5,500 | $8,068 | — |
| 17 | Oklahoma City Community College Oklahoma City, OK Public · 2-year | $37,495 | 33 † | — | $4,739 | 3.5 |
| 18 | South Texas College McAllen, TX Public · 4-year | $37,289 | 54 | — | $1,751 | 1.4 |
| 19 | Clark College Vancouver, WA Public · 4-year | $37,011 | 44 | — | $11,465 | — |
| 20 | Essex County College Newark, NJ Public · 2-year | $34,961 | 25 † | — | $4,436 | — |
| 21 | El Paso Community College El Paso, TX Public · 2-year | $31,657 | 88 | — | $3,206 | — |
How this ranking is built
A school appears here only if it meets every condition below.
- Which programs count
- Main campuses only, one entry per institution. Scorecard reports program outcomes for the whole six-digit federal ID (OPEID6), so branch campuses share their parent’s numbers and are not listed twice.
- Only associate degree programs in Biology (CIP 2601, the four-digit code Scorecard uses to group related programs).
- At least 25 graduates in the earnings sample. Smaller samples are left out because their medians swing too much and the counts carry a little privacy noise.
- A major gets a page only when at least 20 schools qualify. This one has 21.
- Ranked by median earnings 4 years after completing, highest first. Ties go to the larger sample, then to the school name.
- Schools missing earnings or a sample size are left out rather than estimated.
- What the numbers mean
- Earnings: median annual earnings of graduates four years after completing. The cohort completed in academic years 2017-18 and 2018-19 and was measured in calendar years 2022 and 2023, in 2024 dollars.
- Who is counted: graduates who received federal student aid (Title IV grants or loans), and only those who were working and not enrolled in more school that year. Graduates without federal aid, those who went on to further study and those with no earnings are not in the median.
- Scorecard adds privacy noise to counts and medians and hides values it cannot protect, so a gap of a few percent between two schools is not meaningful.
- Graduates: the number of graduates in that earnings sample. A † marks fewer than 40, where the figure is less precise.
- Debt: median federal loan debt (Stafford and Grad PLUS loans disbursed at that school) of graduates who borrowed, from the 2018-19 and 2019-20 completers. Parent PLUS and private loans are not included.
- Net price: average yearly cost after grants and scholarships for the whole institution, not this major, academic year 2023-24.
- Payback: 2 years of net price divided by how much these earnings exceed a high-school graduate’s in the school’s state. Shown only when that gap is at least $2,000, the same formula as the rest of the site.
- Source: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard field-of-study data, June 2026 release.
Top states for Biology earnings
Median of the school medians for states with at least 3 ranked schools. The best school in each state is shown.
| State | Median earnings | Ranked schools | Top school |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | $49,450 | 4 | San Diego City College |
| Texas | $49,305 | 6 | Houston City College |
Related majors
Other fields to compare, by what graduates earn.
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Accounting (Associate)
$47,660 national median · 61 schools
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