a master's degree in industrial engineering is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #62 out of 343 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual looked at 3 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Industrial Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 137 master's degrees in industrial engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Industrial Engineering School for Your Master's Degree
The ie master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality ie 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 master's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection 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 master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master'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 industrial engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of industrial engineering students who choose to seek a master's degree at the school.
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 industrial 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 industrial engineering related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for industrial engineering students working on their master's degree.
The ie 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 Industrial Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region.
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Iowa State University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a master's degree in industrial engineering. Iowa State is a very large public university located in the city of Ames.
Master's students who receive their degree from the ie program make an average of $114,122 in the first couple years of their career.
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.
by our College Data Analytics Team
The ie master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality ie program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
