What can you do with a biology degree?
Where biology graduates actually work, and how exposed those jobs are to AI. Built from ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS: 108,829 people whose bachelor's degree is in this field, aged 22-64.
Biology is mostly a route into health careers, not a degree with one job at the end. About 12 in 100 people with a biology bachelor's degree work as physicians, a job that BLS says needs medical school after the bachelor's. Another 3 in 100 are registered nurses, 3 in 100 are dentists and 2 in 100 are pharmacists.
Counting physician assistants, physical therapists, veterinarians, nurse practitioners and occupational therapists as well, about 26 in 100 work in a clinical job we score.
Few work in the jobs the degree's name suggests. Biological scientists, which we match to our wildlife biologist page, are about 1 in 100. About 4 in 100 teach in schools, with elementary and middle school teachers and secondary school teachers each at about 2 in 100.
About 41 in 100 work in roles we do not score. The largest are managers in other roles and college teachers, at about 3 in 100 each, then physical scientists in other fields at about 3 in 100 and other life scientists at about 2 in 100. This page covers about 59% of graduates, using Census data on more than 108,000 people with a biology degree, so it gives no overall verdict. The chemistry page shows a similar split.
How exposed are biology jobs to AI?
We give biology no overall verdict. Coverage is 59%, just under our 60% bar, and the jobs are spread out: among graduates in jobs we score, about 55% work in AI-resistant jobs, 23% in At risk jobs and 22% in Safe jobs. The largest single group, about 12% of all graduates, are physicians, which we rate AI-resistant despite the paperwork because every state licenses them after medical school and residency. Registered nurses carry the same label, and dentists rate Safe.
The At risk share comes from many smaller jobs, such as medical and health services managers and software developers. Confidence is insufficient because about 41% of graduates work in roles we do not score.
These figures cover the 59% of biology graduates who work in occupations we score. The other 41% work in roles we do not cover (largest: Other Managers; Postsecondary Teachers; Physical Scientists, all Other). Signal 01 averages each job's own structural exposure, weighted by how many graduates work there; it describes tasks, not whether jobs will disappear.
Where biology graduates actually work
These 10 occupations account for 36% of biology graduates. The rest are spread across many smaller occupations, each under 1%. Graduates often work outside the field.
Careers next door to biology, least exposed first
Curated related careers of the main occupations above, ranked by structural exposure (lowest first), so you can see which neighboring routes are less and more exposed.
What the research says about AI and biology graduates
The Census Bureau working paper (CES 26-56, September 2026) lists biology in its appendix table with exposure below the average major's, about 0. 5 standard deviations under on its main measure. From 2022 to 2024, biology graduates' employment rate and earnings moved almost exactly in line with the average major's: the table's 2024 results are under half a point for employment and about 0. 1% for earnings, on about 129,000 graduates from 2018 to 2022.
The paper's sharpest declines are in computer science and related software degrees.
Employ America (July 2025), using NY Fed data, shows biology's unemployment rate in 2023 about 1.2 points below its 2017-2018 level. The Dallas Fed names nursing, education and psychology as least exposed and does not mention biology, and the NBER paper treats recent graduates as one group. The studies disagree about how much of any graduate weakness is due to AI, so none of this shows what AI will do to biology graduates.
Read the full evidence review: what the studies say about AI and graduate jobs →
Degrees whose graduates work in similar jobs
How this page was built
Graduate shares come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS), field of degree "Biology" (code 3600), weighted to the population. Each occupation we cover is scored with the numbers already published on its own page on this site, then averaged by graduate share. Occupations without a page are shown but never scored. Graduates aged 22-64 are included, so the mix reflects the whole working-age group, not only recent graduates. The survey records the most recent occupation of people who were not working when surveyed (unemployed or out of the labor force), and they are counted in it: across the degrees on this site that is about 9 in 100 graduates, between 6 and 13 in 100 depending on the degree, so "work as" on this page means "work or last worked as". Sources: www2.census.gov, www2.census.gov, employamerica.org, www.dallasfed.org, www.nber.org, www.bls.gov, www.bls.gov. This page is general information, not career or educational advice.