When it comes to popularity, a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering sits in the middle of the road, ranking #174 out of 363 majors in the country. So, it might take a little more work to find colleges and universities that offer the degree program.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 9 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Petroleum Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 281 bachelor's degrees in petroleum engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Petroleum Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of petroleum 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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 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 bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor'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 - How many other petroleum engineering students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor'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 petroleum 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 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 bachelor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Petroleum Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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It is difficult to beat Texas A&M University - College Station if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering. Texas A&M College Station is a fairly large public university located in the city of College Station.
Bachelor's recipients from the petroleum engineering degree program at Texas A&M University - College Station get $7,450 more than the standard graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
The University of Texas at Austin is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering. UT Austin is a very large public university located in the large city of Austin.
Those petroleum engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from The University of Texas at Austin earn $24,608 more than the standard petroleum engineering student.
It's difficult to beat Texas Tech University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering. Located in the large city of Lubbock, Texas Tech is a public university with a very large student population.
Those petroleum engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from Texas Tech University receive $18,307 more than the average petroleum engineering student.
University of Oklahoma Norman Campus is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering. University of Oklahoma is a fairly large public university located in the suburb of Norman.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the petroleum engineering program earn about $61,223 for their early 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 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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
