If you plan on getting your doctor's degree in nuclear engineering, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #96 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 6 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Nuclear Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 171 doctor's degrees in nuclear engineering during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Nuclear Engineering School for Your Doctor's Degree
The nuclear engineering doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. 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 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 nuclear engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other nuclear engineering students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor's degree.
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 much debt nuclear 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 nuclear engineering related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for nuclear engineering students working on their doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Nuclear Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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University of Michigan - Ann Arbor is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in nuclear engineering. U-M is a very large public university located in the midsize city of Ann Arbor.
After graduating, nuclear engineering doctorate recipients usually earn an average of $112,747 in their early careers.
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).