a bachelor's degree in environmental engineering is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #136 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 12 schools in the Far Western US Region to determine which ones were the best for environmental engineering students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 292 bachelor's degrees in environmental engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Environmental Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of environmental engineering for getting your bachelor'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. 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 account for this we consider a college's overall Best Colleges 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 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 environmental engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other environmental 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 easy is it for environmental engineering to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized environmental engineering related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for environmental engineering students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Environmental Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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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Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in environmental engineering needs to look into California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is a fairly large public university located in the small suburb of San Luis Obispo.
Environmental Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo get an earnings boost of approximately $18,166 above the typical earnings of environmental engineering majors.
Located in the city of San Diego, SDSU is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Those environmental engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from San Diego State University receive $2,451 more than the standard environmental engineering student.
Located in the city of Corvallis, Oregon State is a public university with a very large student population.
Those environmental engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from Oregon State University make $4,192 more than the typical environmental engineering grad.
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).