Mechanical Engineering is of the hottest bachelor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #17 most popular major in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 22 schools in the Plains States Region to determine which ones were the best for mechanical engineering students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 2,346 bachelor's degrees in mechanical engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Mechanical Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of mechanical 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 include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection 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 much a school focuses on mechanical engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of mechanical engineering students who choose to seek a bachelor'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 mechanical 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 mechanical engineering related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for mechanical 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 Mechanical Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that 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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Every student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering has to check out University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. UMN Twin Cities is a very large public university located in the large city of Minneapolis.
Bachelor's recipients from the mechanical engineering degree program at University of Minnesota - Twin Cities earn $2,169 above the typical college grad in this field shortly after graduation.
Missouri University of Science and Technology is a good decision for students interested in a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Located in the town of Rolla, Missouri University of Science and Technology is a public university with a moderately-sized student population.
Those mechanical engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from Missouri University of Science and Technology earn $4,591 more than the average me graduate.
Washington University in St Louis is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. WUSTL is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Saint Louis.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the me program earn about $72,057 for their early career.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering needs to take a look at Iowa State University. Iowa State is a fairly large public university located in the city of Ames.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the me program report average early career income of $72,900.
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).
Your choice of mechanical 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.
