Mechanical Engineering is of the hottest doctor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #17 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
College Factual looked at 10 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Mechanical Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 276 doctor's degrees in mechanical engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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.
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 doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for mechanical engineering students working on their doctor's degree.
The me 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 Mechanical Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region.
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Any student who is interested in a doctor's degree in mechanical engineering has to take a look at Stanford University. Stanford is a large private not-for-profit university located in the large suburb of Stanford.
Students who graduate with their doctorate from the me program report average early career earnings of $143,758.
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).
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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
