a master's degree in chemical engineering is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #85 out of 343 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in Pennsylvania to determine which ones were the best for chemical engineering students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 136 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
The chem eng master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality chem eng program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree 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.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on chemical engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of chemical engineering students who choose to seek a master'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 much debt chemical engineering students go into to obtain their master's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized chemical engineering related body.
Our complete 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.
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 Chemical Engineering Master's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania list to help you make the college decision.
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It is hard to beat Drexel University if you want to pursue a master's degree in chemical engineering. Drexel is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Philadelphia.
Master's students who receive their degree from the chem eng program earn around $84,947 in the first couple years of their career.
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 chem eng master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality chem eng program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
