Engineering is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #4 most popular doctor's degree program in the country. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 9 schools in the New England Region to determine which ones were the best for engineering students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 930 doctor's degrees in engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Engineering School for Your Doctor's Degree
The 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. 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 doctor's degree school is important to ensure a good 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 Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their doctor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their doctor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of engineering students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
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 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 engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for 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 Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the New England Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
Brown University is a good decision for individuals interested in a doctor's degree in engineering. Located in the midsize city of Providence, Brown is a private not-for-profit university with a large student population.More information about a doctorate in engineering from Brown University
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).