Actuarial Science Degrees Online B.S
Do you do any hang gliding? Base jumping? How about scuba diving?
Okay, we don't really care about the answers to these questions. But if you're an actuary, they're actually pretty important!
Actuaries play an extremely important role in commerce, and in the insurance industry in particular. Their job is to analyze the potential risk of an investment and assess whether that risk will pose a net loss or gain to the company they work for.
In the case of the questions mentioned above, an actuary might need to know about the lifestyle and hobbies of someone their company is offering life insurance to. If a person is a big risk taker, they might not be worth risking a $1 million dollar life insurance policy!
But actuaries don't do just life insurance. Their work is crucial to other sorts of insurance work as well as other forms of investment risk assessment. Actuaries use tools such as calculus and advanced statistics to determine a wide variety of risk factors, and their work is important to executives, governments, shareholders, and clients alike.
High Demand for Actuarial Science
There's more. Actuaries are in extremely high demand right now, and that demand is set to increase by 18 percent over the next several years, more than double the expectation of all other professions combined. And the median salary for actuaries is just shy of $100,000. If you're into advanced mathematics and are looking for a career, this might be the ticket!
The best place to start is in a good bachelors program in mathematics, actuarial science, or some combination of the two. And that's where we come in. We've compiled a list of the top 35 programs in actuarial science with your needs in mind. The first thing we want to know, like you, is the bottom line: how much is this going to set me back? So we've included the annual tuition for each school right up front for you. We've also included our College Choice Score, which is computed based on each school's reputation in the field and its return on investment. The end result is a list of schools that balance cost, reputation, and, ultimately, what they can do for you and your unique goals. You can't go wrong with any of them, of course, but these schools are leading the way.
The rankings you're about to read are based on a few important sources. The first source is actual college freshman polled during a nationwide survey published by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. These students rated academic reputation, financial aid offerings, overall cost of school, and the survey also took into account graduate success rates on the post-college job market. These factors were weighed equally alongside data from other publicly available sources, including U.S. News & World Report, the National Center for Education Statistics, and PayScale.com.
Rankings of the Top Actuarial Science Degrees
See our rankings methodology page.


