Ranked #17 in popularity, mechanical engineering is one of the most sought-after doctor's degree programs in the nation. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual reviewed 63 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for doctor's degree seekers in the field of mechanical engineering. Combined, these schools handed out 1,842 doctor's degrees in mechanical engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Mechanical Engineering School for Your Doctor's Degree
The me doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality me program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree 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 doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to mechanical engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of mechanical engineering students who choose to seek a doctor'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 mechanical engineering to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized mechanical engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for mechanical engineering students working on their doctor'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 Mechanical Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
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ADBLOCK #171
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Mechanical Engineering in the United States
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in mechanical engineering. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
Every student pursuing a degree in a doctor's degree in mechanical engineering has to look into Stanford University. Stanford is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Stanford.
Mechanical Engineering doctor's degree recipients from Stanford University receive an earnings boost of about $29,557 above the typical income of mechanical engineering majors.
Purdue is a very large public university located in the small city of West Lafayette.
Doctorate recipients from the mechanical engineering program at Purdue University - Main Campus make $5,346 above the typical graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
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Additional Noteworthy Schools
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Mechanical Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools award.
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).