If you pursue a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #17 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
College Factual looked at 9 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Mechanical Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in Illinois ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 838 bachelor's degrees in mechanical engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of different 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 bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 full 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 Illinois ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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It's difficult to beat University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. UIUC is a very large public university located in the small city of Champaign.
Those mechanical engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign receive $9,373 more than the average me graduate.
It is hard to beat Northwestern University if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Located in the city of Evanston, Northwestern is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the mechanical engineering program at Northwestern University get $4,439 above the typical graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
University of Illinois at Chicago is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Located in the city of Chicago, UIC is a public university with a very large student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the me program report average early career income of $69,871.
Illinois Institute of Technology is a great decision for students interested in a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Illinois Tech is a moderately-sized private not-for-profit school located in the large city of Chicago.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the me program state that they receive average early career wages of $65,386.
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).