If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in general engineering technology, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #143 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in Illinois to determine which ones were the best for general engineering technology students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 109 bachelor's degrees in general engineering technology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great General Engineering Technology School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The engineering tech bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality engineering tech program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to general engineering technology students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of general engineering technology students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How easy is it for general engineering technology to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized general engineering technology related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for general engineering technology students working on their bachelor's degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best General Engineering Technology Bachelor's Degree Schools in Illinois list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in general engineering technology needs to look into Northern Illinois University. Located in the small suburb of Dekalb, NIU is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Soon after graduating, engineering tech bachelor's recipients generally earn around $62,117 in their early careers.
Illinois State University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in general engineering technology. Illinois State is a very large public university located in the medium-sized suburb of Normal.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the engineering tech program report average early career income of $55,532.
Western Illinois University is a good choice for students interested in a bachelor's degree in general engineering technology. Located in the town of Macomb, WIU is a public university with a medium-sized student population.
General Engineering Technology bachelor's degree recipients from Western Illinois University receive an earnings boost of about $3,958 over the average earnings of general engineering technology graduates.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
by our College Data Analytics Team
The engineering tech bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality engineering tech program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
