If you plan on getting your master's degree in civil engineering, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #40 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 5 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Civil Engineering Master's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 191 master's degrees in civil engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Civil Engineering School for Your Master's Degree
The civil eng master'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 master's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of various 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 master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master'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 master'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 easy is it for civil engineering to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized civil engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for civil engineering students working on their master's degree.
The civil 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 Civil Engineering Master's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania.
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Any student who is interested in a master's degree in civil engineering needs to check out Villanova University. Villanova is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Villanova.
Master's recipients from the civil engineering degree program at Villanova University make $7,743 above the standard graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
University of Pittsburgh - Pittsburgh Campus is a good choice for individuals pursuing a master's degree in civil engineering. Pitt is a fairly large public university located in the large city of Pittsburgh.
Students who graduate with their master's from the civil eng program report average early career earnings of $77,879.
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).