The Easiest Science College Majors Ranked

scientist microscope

STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, are among the toughest majors offered in universities.

Which one is the easiest?

How Can we Measure Difficulty?

The most common way of measuring difficulty is by asking students how many hours they study per week. I use an alternative method: simply have the students tell you how hard their coursework is.

I collected this data from a popular site on which college students rate their coursework. This data comes from 200 Universities in the USA to get the average difficulty by major on a scale of 1 to 5.

As for validity, these ratings are strongly correlated with the number of hours studied per week as collected by surveys.

The List of Easiest and Hardest Science Majors

The table below ranks STEM majors from easiest to hardest, displaying on a scale of 1-5 the average students’ difficulty rating for the major and how the major ranks in difficulty relative to all majors (118 in total). Students who took Military Technologies courses rated their coursework as easiest (2.6 out of 5), while, Biochemical Sciences courses were rated as hardest (3.6 out of 5). In fact, Biochemical Sciences has the highest difficulty rating of all majors in America.

What Do We Learn From This List?

The key lesson from this list is STEM degrees are NOT easy. If you were to look at the full list of major rankings you would note that out of the top 20 hardest majors, 18 of them are STEM majors. STEM’s reputation as a rigorous field is thus supported by millions of college student ratings.

After graduation, this rigorous training is well rewarded financially – STEM has the highest starting and mid-career salary of all fields.

When ranking majors by starting salary, 22 out of 25 of the highest paying majors are in STEM.