When it comes to popularity, a master's degree in petroleum engineering sits in the middle of the road, ranking #192 out of 343 majors in the country. So, it might take a little more work to find colleges and universities that offer the degree program.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 5 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for petroleum engineering students pursuing a master's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 117 master's degrees in petroleum engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Petroleum Engineering School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of petroleum engineering for getting your master'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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to petroleum engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of petroleum engineering students who choose to seek a master'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 petroleum engineering students go into to obtain their master'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 petroleum engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for petroleum engineering students working on their master'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 Petroleum Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Texas A&M University - College Station is a good decision for individuals pursuing a master's degree in petroleum engineering. Texas A&M College Station is a fairly large public university located in the midsize city of College Station.
Soon after graduation, petroleum engineering master's recipients typically make an average of $171,571 in the first five years of their career.
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.
Your choice of petroleum engineering for getting your master'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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
