Ranked #35 in popularity, civil engineering is one of the most sought-after bachelor's degree programs in the nation. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 35 schools in the Middle Atlantic Region to determine which ones were the best for civil engineering students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 2,070 bachelor's degrees in civil engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 account for this we consider 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.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 schools for civil engineering students working on their bachelor'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 Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in civil engineering needs to look into New Jersey Institute of Technology. NJIT is a large public school located in the large city of Newark.
Soon after graduation, civil eng bachelor's recipients typically make about $68,288 in their early careers.
Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in civil engineering needs to take a look at Stevens Institute of Technology. Located in the large suburb of Hoboken, Stevens is a private not-for-profit school with a medium-sized student population.
Civil Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from Stevens Institute of Technology receive an earnings boost of about $2,664 over the typical earnings of civil engineering graduates.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in civil engineering has to take a look at Cornell University. Located in the city of Ithaca, Cornell is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
Those civil engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from Cornell University earn $8,914 more than the typical civil eng grad.
Located in the large suburb of College Park, UMCP is a public university with a very large student population.
Civil Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from University of Maryland - College Park receive an earnings boost of about $5,384 above the average income of civil engineering majors.
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).