2025 Best Civil Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools
47Colleges in the United States
1,240Doctor's Degrees
Civil Engineering is of the hottest doctor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #29 most popular major in the country. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 47 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Civil Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,240 doctor's degrees in civil engineering during the <nil> academic year.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Urban Planning (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.7
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Urban Planning (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" REJECTED (relevance 0.7)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Urban Planning (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 0.7
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Urban Planning (I Have a Bachelors)" REJECTED (relevance 0.7)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Science & Engineering Bachelors Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Science & Engineering Bachelors Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Science & Engineering Diploma Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Science & Engineering Diploma Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 0
DEBUG: No relevant offers, showing generic ESYOH widget
Choosing a Great Civil Engineering School for Your Doctor's Degree
The civil eng doctor'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. 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 doctor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor'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 Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their doctor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their doctor'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 much a school focuses on civil engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of civil engineering students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
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 civil engineering to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
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 doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Civil Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "engineering//civil-engineering"
DEBUG: Checking offer "Science & Engineering Diploma Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Science & Engineering Diploma Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 1
DEBUG: relevant_offers > 0, checking for ESYOH offers
DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 1 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.5
DEBUG: esyoh_offers count = 1
DEBUG: ESYOH offers found, rendering ESYOH widget
DEBUG: most_relevant_only = true, filtering for most relevant
DEBUG: Found 0 offers with relevance >= 1.0
DEBUG: Backfilling with 0 offers with relevance >= 0.9
DEBUG: Backfilling with 0 offers with relevance >= 0.8
DEBUG: Backfilling with 0 offers with relevance >= 0.7
DEBUG: Backfilling with 1 offers with relevance >= 0.6
Additional Noteworthy Schools
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Civil Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools award.
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).