If you plan on getting your master's degree in chemical engineering, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #85 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 14 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Chemical Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 588 master's degrees in chemical engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Chemical Engineering School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of chemical engineering for getting your master's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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 master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to chemical engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other chemical engineering students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for chemical engineering to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized chemical engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for chemical engineering students working on their master's degree.
The chem eng 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 Chemical Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region.
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Columbia University in the City of New York is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in chemical engineering. Located in the large city of New York, Columbia is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Master's recipients from the chemical engineering program at Columbia University in the City of New York make $9,714 above the typical college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
Rutgers New Brunswick is a fairly large public university located in the city of New Brunswick.
Chemical Engineering master's degree recipients from Rutgers University - New Brunswick receive an earnings boost of approximately $3,944 over the typical income of chemical engineering graduates.
Located in the city of Newark, NJIT is a public school with a large student population.
Chemical Engineering master's degree recipients from New Jersey Institute of Technology receive an earnings boost of approximately $6,175 above the average income of chemical 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).