If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in aerospace & aeronautical engineering, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #76 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 11 schools in the Far Western US Region to determine which ones were the best for aerospace & aeronautical engineering students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 967 bachelor's degrees in aerospace & aeronautical engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Aerospace & Aeronautical Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The aerospace engineering bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality aerospace engineering program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 account for this we include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 aerospace & aeronautical engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other aerospace & aeronautical engineering students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
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 aerospace & aeronautical engineering 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 aerospace & aeronautical engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for aerospace & aeronautical engineering students working on their bachelor's degree.
The aerospace engineering school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Aerospace & Aeronautical Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in aerospace & aeronautical engineering needs to check out University of Southern California. Located in the city of Los Angeles, USC is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Aerospace & Aeronautical Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from University of Southern California earn a boost of around $5,373 over the typical earnings of aerospace & aeronautical engineering majors.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in aerospace & aeronautical engineering needs to look into California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is a very large public university located in the small suburb of San Luis Obispo.
Bachelor's recipients from the aerospace & aeronautical engineering major at California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo earn $11,902 more than the average college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
University of California - San Diego is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in aerospace & aeronautical engineering. Located in the city of La Jolla, UCSD is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the aerospace engineering program state that they receive average early career wages of $65,401.
UW Seattle is a fairly large public university located in the city of Seattle.
Those aerospace & aeronautical engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Washington - Seattle Campus receive $3,274 more than the typical aerospace engineering student.
Located in the suburb of Pomona, Cal Poly Pomona is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Aerospace & Aeronautical Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from California State Polytechnic University - Pomona receive an earnings boost of approximately $4,713 over the typical earnings of aerospace & aeronautical engineering majors.
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).