The short answer
For the purpose of comparing programs, kinesiology and exercise science are the same degree. The federal government classifies both under CIP 31.0505, “Exercise Science and Kinesiology”, and that is the code every program on this site reports under. When a school files its completions with IPEDS, a B.S. in Kinesiology and a B.S. in Exercise Science are indistinguishable.
What differs is the name on the diploma, and the names do not follow a pattern you can rely on. Of the 475 programs where we could read the degree title off the school’s own page, there are 231 distinct titles. The two largest families are exercise science with 249 and kinesiology with 152.
What schools actually call it
Programs are bucketed by the first family their title matches, so a “Kinesiology and Exercise Science” degree counts once, under kinesiology.
| Title family | Programs | Share | Examples from school pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exercise science | 249 | 52% | B.S. in Health and Exercise Science; Health and Exercise Science B.S. |
| Kinesiology | 152 | 32% | B.S. in Kinesiology; Dance B.A. and Kinesiology B.S. Dual Degree |
| Sport-titled | 31 | 7% | BSEd in Exercise and Sport Science; Sports Medicine Major |
| Exercise physiology | 17 | 4% | Sport and Exercise Physiology, B.S.; Bachelor of Science in Exercise Physiology |
| Something else entirely | 15 | 3% | B.S. in Physical Education (BSPE); Physical Education |
| Human performance or movement science | 11 | 2% | Online Bachelor's in Human Performance; Health and Human Performance |
Based on the 475 of 568 programs whose own page named the degree.
Why the names differ
The naming is departmental history, not curriculum design. Many of these programs began as physical education departments and renamed as the field moved toward clinical and research work; kinesiology is the older academic term, exercise science the more vocational-sounding one, and which a school landed on usually says more about when it last restructured than about what it teaches.
You can see the drift in the sport-titled group: 31 programs use a sport or human-performance framing for a degree filed under the same code as a clinically-oriented exercise physiology program. The classification cannot tell them apart, so the title is doing work the federal data does not.
The practical consequence is that title is a poor filter. If you search only for “kinesiology” you miss most of the field, because the largest title family is not the one the field is named after.
When the title does matter
Two cases, and both are about what comes after the degree rather than the degree itself.
The first is certification eligibility. The ACSM-EP states its prerequisite as a bachelor’s in exercise science, exercise physiology or kinesiology, which covers every family in the table above. But the CSCS is about to become much narrower: from 2030, US candidates will need a degree from a CASCE-accredited program specifically, and that is a property of the individual program rather than of what it is called.
The second is graduate admission. A DPT or OT program cares about the prerequisite courses on your transcript, not the words on your diploma. A sport-management-flavored degree under this code can be light on the anatomy, physiology and statistics those programs require, while a differently-named degree at another school covers all of them. So read the plan of study, not the title.
For everything else, ignore the name and compare the programs. That is what the rankings do: one scoring model across the whole code, so a kinesiology degree and an exercise science degree are held to the same standard.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure in this guide is computed at build time from the same federal IPEDS data behind the program rankings, so it moves when the data moves rather than being typed in once. Wage figures come from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release. Certification rules come from the issuing body’s own page, with the date each was checked on the certification pages.