If you're seeking a Bachelor's Degree in nuclear engineering, you will have fewer peers than average since the major degree program is the #219 one in the country in terms of popularity.While this may limit the number of schools that offer the degree program, there are still top-quality ones to be found.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 13 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Nuclear Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 427 bachelor's degrees in nuclear engineering to qualified students.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Science & Engineering Bachelors Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Science & Engineering Bachelors Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Science & Engineering Diploma Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.6
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "Science & Engineering Diploma Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" REJECTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 0
DEBUG: No relevant offers, showing generic ESYOH widget
Choosing a Great Nuclear Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The nuclear engineering bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality nuclear engineering program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a school'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 Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor'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 nuclear engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of nuclear 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 much debt nuclear engineering students go into to obtain their bachelor'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 bachelor'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 Nuclear Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools list to help you make the college decision.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "engineering//nuclear-engineering"
Texas A&M University - College Station is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering. Texas A&M College Station is a very large public university located in the medium-sized city of College Station.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the nuclear engineering program state that they receive average early career income of $66,604.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering. UIUC is a fairly large public university located in the small city of Champaign.
Nuclear Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign earn a boost of about $7,962 over the average earnings of nuclear engineering majors.
Located in the city of Troy, RPI is a private not-for-profit school with a medium-sized student population.
Those nuclear engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute make $3,842 more than the standard nuclear engineering graduate.
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 nuclear engineering bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality nuclear engineering program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
