Civil Engineering is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #40 most popular master's degree program in the country. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
College Factual looked at 9 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Civil Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 211 master's degrees in civil engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Civil Engineering School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of civil engineering for getting your master's degree school matters. 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
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 for a Master'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 master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 master'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 much debt civil engineering students go into to obtain their master'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 master'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 Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Any student who is interested in a master's degree in civil engineering needs to take a look at Iowa State University. Located in the small city of Ames, Iowa State is a public university with a fairly large student population.
After graduating, civil eng master's recipients usually make an average of $79,509 at the beginning of their careers.
Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in civil engineering needs to look into Missouri University of Science and Technology. Missouri University of Science and Technology is a medium-sized public university located in the remote town of Rolla.
Those civil engineering students who get their master's degree from Missouri University of Science and Technology receive $4,311 more than the average civil eng grad.
University of Kansas is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in civil engineering. KU is a fairly large public university located in the city of Lawrence.
Those civil engineering students who get their master's degree from University of Kansas make $2,120 more than the typical civil eng student.
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).
Your choice of civil engineering for getting your master's degree school matters. 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:
