Optometry Degrees
Like this graph? You can use it on your website.
Salaries For Degrees in Optometry
Graduates in Optometry can be employed in a variety of jobs. While no one can say with certainty what you personally will do with a degree in Optometry, our survey panel picked the following jobs as likely options:
Students with a degree in Optometry are considered well prepared for becoming Optometrists.
The median salary for people with a degree in Optometry is $92,270.60. The lifetime value of this degree is approximately $2,145,819.00.
Salaries are highly dependent on individual negotiating skill, years of related experience, your employer, area, and a host of other factors. The estimates we show on these pages are just that: estimates. Your individual experience will likely vary.
Where does this come from?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a unit of the US government, classifies all workers into some 800-odd occupational categories. We paid a team of freelancers to solicit their view on what type of degree a holder of each type of job would likely have majored in. For pairs which had a high degree of consensus, we created a link between the degree and the job.
From this, we calculated the average salary for Optometry degrees and converted it into a lifetime value. We then compared it against other degrees at the same level of schooling (such as associate's, bachelor's, or master's), so that you can make informed educational and employment decisions.
What Can an Optometry Student Expect to Learn?
If you love medicine, enjoy gazing longingly into people’s eyes and have a good bedside manner, Optometry makes for an excellent career option. At first glance, it might seem like a narrow field, but it actually covers numerous areas of study. Below we’ve compiled a breakdown of what Optometry students study, some traditional degree options, whether online study is an option, and what famous people have gone before you in this field.
The course of study in a typical four-year program is diverse. As a student, you’ll study optics, the eye and its diseases, lenses, and some medicine. Below is a breakdown of these fields and how each is useful to Optometrists.
Let’s start with optics. Optics is an area of Physics that studies light and vision and will be a big part of the Optometry program. It is broken down into different fields. For example, geometric optics deals with light rays and images; physical optics studies how material objects scatter, reflect and absorb light; and physical optics studies light’s creation, properties and characteristics. A good grounding in this material will help students understand how the eye works.
Optometry students obviously study the eye itself. This includes studies of eye diseases, eye anatomy, myotology, and ocular pharmacology (how drugs affect the eye). They also study neurophysiology and neuroanatomy in the visual system, which help students understand how the eyes work within the nervous system. They learn how the eyes perceive color, form, movement and space and how to screen vision. This equips students to diagnose and treat eye problems such as farsightedness, nearsightedness, glaucoma, astigmatism, color blindness and depth perception issues.
Since Optometrists prescribe glasses and contact lenses, Optometry students also learn how lenses are designed and built, how to fit them on patients, and how to apply the right lenses to different eye problems.
Why Optometry?
One reason studying Optometry is such a varied field is that students get to study more than just the eye and optics. They take courses in human anatomy, pharmacology (how drugs affect the body), pathology (the causes, nature, development and consequences of disease), biochemistry, psychology, statistics and epidemiology. These areas of study come in handy for optometrists since they diagnose diseases like hypertension and diabetes as well as eye problems.
Optometry students start their studies off in the classroom, but they eventually get practical experience dealing with patients in clinic duty. This is typically during their last year. The four years of Optometry school are often followed by a year or two of residency.
To prepare for Optometry, undergraduate students should get a solid grounding in the Physics, Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, and Statistics.
Online Schools Offering Accredited Optometry Degree Programs
Although students are increasingly opting for online degrees, there are not as many options in the field of Optometry. According to the Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry, no accredited online degree programs exist. However, a number of accredited schools do offer some courses online.
For example, The Universtiy of Houston College of Optometry, Southern California College of Optometry and The Ohio State University, College of Optometry offer online Optometry courses as part of their Continuing Education departments. All three also have offline full-degree programs in Optometry.
Top Colleges & Universities Offering Campus-based Optometry Degrees
In the United States and its territories, there are only seventeen accredited Optometry programs. As a result, competition is fierce. Optometry school rankings are nonexistent, so when choosing a school, students need to look at the fit between their interests and the school’s offerings, as well as faculty-student ratio, how much practical training is available, and accreditation. It’s also useful to look at the personality of the school, so here are a few well-known schools accredited by the Council on Optometric Education that have a unique character.
If you’re looking for the oldest Optometry school in the U.S., your pick would be The Illinois College of Optometry in Chicago. It opened its doors in 1872. It’s also a good place for undergraduates to get a head start in this career as it provides a B.S. in Visual Science.
The most culturally diverse Optometry school in the United States is also the second oldest. At the New England College of Optometry in Boston, Massachusetts, started in 1892, twenty-five percent of its student body did pre-graduate school training abroad.
If you’re interested in practicing another language while studying Optometry, Canada and Puerto Rico offer accredited programs. The University of Montreal School of Optometry in Canada offers instruction in French. The Inter-American University of Puerto Rico School of Optometry in San Juan, Puerto Rico offers a warmer climate and is a Spanish-English bilingual program. It requires Spanish courses to students who aren’t fluent in Spanish yet.
Famous Optometry Students 
A number interesting characters have passed through this discipline. Perhaps the most famous is Benjamin Franklin (pictured right). He dabbled in many areas, and when he got tired of switching between reading glasses and regular glasses, he invented bifocals in the 1770’s. He cut his regular glasses and his reading glasses in two; he then fused the halves together.
Johannes Kepler, who was principally a mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, brought his knowledge of optics and planets to bear on the study of the eyes. He is credited with discovering how images are projected onto the retina and is therefore a seminal figure in the field of Optometry.
Equally important to the development of Optometry was the Spanish eye specialist Benito Daza de Valdés. He wrote a book in 1623 on the eye and on how lenses correct vision.
More recently, a graduate from the Southern College of Optometry in Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. Gil Morgan, has been a successful golfer in the PGA tour since 1968.
Optometry allows those with curiosity and varied interests to combine the study of science and medicine with good people skills. Although it is a competitive field to enter, once you have your foot in the door, plenty of work is available.
