Materials Engineering is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #145 most popular bachelor's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 44 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Materials Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,305 bachelor's degrees in materials engineering during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Materials Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of materials 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
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 ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on materials engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of materials engineering students who choose to seek a bachelor'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 easy is it for materials 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 materials engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for materials engineering students working on their bachelor'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 Materials Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
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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It's hard to beat Massachusetts Institute of Technology if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in materials engineering. Located in the midsize city of Cambridge, MIT is a private not-for-profit school with a fairly large student population.
After graduation, materials engineering bachelor's recipients generally make about $65,919 in their early careers.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in materials engineering. Located in the small city of Champaign, UIUC is a public university with a very large student population.
Materials Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign get an earnings boost of around $3,739 above the typical income of materials engineering majors.
Located in the large city of Atlanta, Georgia Tech is a public school with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the materials engineering major at Georgia Institute of Technology - Main Campus earn $5,147 more than the standard college grad with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
Located in the medium-sized city of Gainesville, UF is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the materials engineering major at University of Florida make $7,859 more than the typical college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
U-M is a very large public university located in the city of Ann Arbor.
Materials Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from University of Michigan - Ann Arbor earn a boost of about $3,700 over the average earnings of materials engineering graduates.
Purdue is a very large public university located in the small city of West Lafayette.
Bachelor's recipients from the materials engineering program at Purdue University - Main Campus make $6,924 more than the standard college grad with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
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).