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 8 schools in the Rocky Mountains Region to determine which ones were the best for chemical engineering students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 495 bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Chemical Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of chemical engineering for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality chem eng 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 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.
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 much a school focuses on chemical engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of chemical engineering 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 chemical 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 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.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Chemical Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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 difficult to beat Colorado School of Mines if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. Mines is a moderately-sized public school located in the suburb of Golden.
After graduating, chem eng bachelor's recipients generally earn an average of $68,318 in their early careers.
It's difficult to beat Colorado State University - Fort Collins if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. Located in the city of Fort Collins, Colorado State is a public university with a fairly large student population.
After graduating, chem eng bachelor's recipients usually make an average of $62,468 at the beginning of their careers.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering needs to look into University of Colorado Boulder. Located in the midsize city of Boulder, CU - Boulder is a public university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the chemical engineering major at University of Colorado Boulder earn $3,225 above the standard graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering has to take a look at Brigham Young University - Provo. Located in the medium-sized city of Provo, BYU is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Those chemical engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University - Provo earn $10,431 more than the average chem eng student.
Located in the city of Salt Lake City, U of U is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the chemical engineering major at University of Utah make $6,707 more than the typical college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Located in the distant town of Moscow, U of I is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Chemical Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from University of Idaho earn a boost of about $8,781 above the typical earnings of chemical engineering 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).