If you pursue a bachelor's degree in civil engineering, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #35 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 12 schools in Pennsylvania to determine which ones were the best for civil engineering students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 697 bachelor's degrees in civil engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Civil Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The civil eng bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality civil 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 many resources a school devotes to civil engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other civil 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 much debt civil 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 civil engineering related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for civil engineering students working on their bachelor'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 Civil Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania list to help you make the college decision.
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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Villanova University is a wonderful choice for individuals interested in a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. Villanova is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Villanova.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the civil eng program make an average of $71,525 for their early career.
Lehigh University is a wonderful decision for students interested in a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. Lehigh is a medium-sized private not-for-profit university located in the city of Bethlehem.
Those civil engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from Lehigh University earn $2,814 more than the typical civil eng grad.
It is difficult to beat University of Pittsburgh - Pittsburgh Campus if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. Pitt is a fairly large public university located in the large city of Pittsburgh.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the civil eng program make around $66,943 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).