Chemical Engineering is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #51 most popular bachelor's degree program in the country. 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 6 schools in Massachusetts to determine which ones were the best for chemical engineering students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 370 bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Chemical Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The chem eng bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
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 bachelor'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 much debt chemical engineering students go into to obtain their bachelor'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 bachelor'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 Bachelor's Degree Schools in Massachusetts.
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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It is hard to beat Massachusetts Institute of Technology if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. Located in the city of Cambridge, MIT is a private not-for-profit school with a large student population.
Those chemical engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology make $2,465 more than the average chem eng grad.
Northeastern University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. Northeastern is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Boston.
Chemical Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from Northeastern University earn a boost of about $4,206 above the typical earnings of chemical engineering majors.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering needs to look into Worcester Polytechnic Institute. WPI is a moderately-sized private not-for-profit school located in the medium-sized city of Worcester.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the chem eng program earn around $78,767 for their early career.
Tufts University is a good option for students interested in a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. Tufts is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Medford.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the chem eng program earn an average of $75,367 for their early 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).