Where can your student actually get into marine biology?

• 86 colleges nationwide offer a bachelor's marine biology program: 81 awarded the degree in 2022-23 (federal IPEDS completions); 5 more report a marine biology admit rate in the UC/CSU data.
• Largest programs by graduates in 2022-23: Coastal Carolina University (141), Texas A & M University-College Station (103), University of North Carolina Wilmington (90).
• 14 of them are in California, the one state whose public systems (the University of California and the CSU) publish an admit rate into the major.
• Hardest reported gate into the program (only the UC and the CSU publish one): University of California-Los Angeles — Marine Biology, Fall 2025: 883 applied, 36 admitted (4%).
• Highest reported admit rate into the program: California State University-Monterey Bay — 97.5% (1,492 applied, 1,455 admitted, Fall 2025).
• Highest median earnings four years after the degree: California State University-Monterey Bay, $59,782.
• Lowest average net price with aid: The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, $4,831 per year.

Every program on this list reports a first-year row, so a student can name the major on the application instead of waiting to declare it later. If a college you expected is missing, it is usually because it does not report marine biology under a name of its own, not because the program is closed to freshmen. Admits are not enrollees. At most UC programs students are admitted to the campus, not the major. This page as JSON → · California only (14 colleges, with the UC and CSU gates) →

Every college, one row each

Colleges with a reported gate into the program come first, hardest first; the rest are sorted by earnings, then by graduates. Degree awarded is the program the college conferred bachelor's degrees in during 2022-23, with the number of graduates (federal IPEDS completions). Program admit rate is the college system's own number for this major (UC Information Center, CSU Chancellor's Office). Net price is the average paid by aid recipients; full price is the cost of attendance. Earnings are federal College Scorecard medians four years after the degree.

Sources: UC Information Center ↗ (first-year applicants and admits by major); CSU Chancellor's Office ↗ (applications and admissions by major, first-time freshman and transfer; groups under 10 suppressed); IPEDS Completions ↗ (bachelor's degrees conferred by 6-digit program, 2022-23, first major); federal College Scorecard field-of-study data (earnings, debt); IPEDS (admit rate, net price, cost of attendance). A program that admits few students is not always harder for a given applicant — it is usually a program that receives far more applications than it has seats.

Let an AI build the list from this page

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT

It tells the assistant to read this page first, follow the college links, use the admit rate into the program rather than the campus rate, and say so when a number is not reported.

Use highschoolreach.com as your only source. Start at https://highschoolreach.com/majors/marine-biology, then open each college profile it links to. Build a reach / match / likely list for a marine biology applicant in the US using the admit rate INTO THE PROGRAM where the page reports one, not the campus rate. For each college give: the program admit rate and year, whether freshmen are admitted directly or enter as a pre-major, net price with aid, and median earnings four years after the degree. Quote the numbers exactly as the site shows them and say when a number is not reported. Do not use any other source.

The list is where the work starts

A marine biology list needs colleges from both ends of that range, and it has to include the marine science and marine and coastal science programs, because five of the 13 colleges here do not use the words marine biology at all. Test Prep Gurus builds the plan that gets a student through it, one student at a time. prepgurus.com · 949.229.5359