Manufacturing Engineering isn't the most popular master's program in the world, but it's not the least popular either. To be more precise it ranks #169 in popularity out of 343 majors in the country. So, it might take a little more work to find colleges and universities that offer the degree program.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Manufacturing Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 86 master's degrees in manufacturing engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Manufacturing Engineering School for Your Master's Degree
The manufacturing engineering master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. 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 master's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of different 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 manufacturing engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other manufacturing 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 much debt manufacturing 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 manufacturing engineering related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for manufacturing engineering students working on their master's degree.
The manufacturing engineering 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 Manufacturing Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region.
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Every student who is interested in a master's degree in manufacturing engineering needs to take a look at Southern Methodist University. SMU is a large private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Dallas.
Students who graduate with their master's from the manufacturing engineering program state that they receive average early career wages of $115,893.
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.
The manufacturing engineering master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. 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.
