2025 Best Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region
6Colleges in the Plains States Region
675Doctor's Degrees
If you plan on getting your doctor's degree in engineering, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #4 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 6 schools in the Plains States Region to determine which ones were the best for engineering students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 675 doctor's degrees in 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)" ACCEPTED (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)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.6)
DEBUG: Checking offer "MBA in Engineering Management" with relevance 0.4
DEBUG: ✗ Offer "MBA in Engineering Management" REJECTED (relevance 0.4)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 2
DEBUG: relevant_offers > 0, checking for ESYOH offers
DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 2 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.5
DEBUG: esyoh_offers count = 2
DEBUG: ESYOH offers found, rendering ESYOH widget
DEBUG: most_relevant_only = true, filtering for most relevant
DEBUG: Found 0 offers with relevance >= 1.0
DEBUG: Backfilling with 0 offers with relevance >= 0.9
DEBUG: Backfilling with 0 offers with relevance >= 0.8
DEBUG: Backfilling with 0 offers with relevance >= 0.7
DEBUG: Backfilling with 2 offers with relevance >= 0.6
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree 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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 colleges 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 Plains States Region.
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).