2025 Best Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region
15Colleges in the Southwest Region
1,467Doctor's Degrees
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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 15 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,467 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
Your choice of engineering for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality 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
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor'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.
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
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 engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other engineering students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor'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 easy is it for engineering to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized engineering related body.
Our complete 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.
The engineering school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region.
Rice University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in engineering. Located in the large city of Houston, Rice is a private not-for-profit university with a moderately-sized student population.More information about a doctorate in engineering from Rice 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).