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.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 8 schools in California to determine which ones were the best for mechanical engineering students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 219 doctor's degrees in mechanical engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Mechanical Engineering School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of mechanical engineering for getting your doctor'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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
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 - How many other mechanical engineering students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor'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 mechanical engineering students go into to obtain their doctor'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 mechanical engineering related body.
Our full 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.
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 in California list to help you make the college decision.
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It's hard to beat Stanford University if you wish to pursue a doctor's degree in mechanical engineering. Located in the large suburb of Stanford, Stanford is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Students who graduate with their doctorate from the me program state that they receive 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).
Your choice of mechanical engineering for getting your doctor'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
