a master's degree in engineering is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #6 out of 37 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 48 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 8,796 master's degrees in engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Engineering School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of 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. 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 make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Master'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 master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 master'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 easy is it for engineering to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
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 colleges for 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 Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region list to help you make the college decision.
Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in engineering has to check out Duke University. Located in the city of Durham, Duke is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.More information about a master’s in engineering from Duke University
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Additional Noteworthy Schools
Here are some additional great schools for Engineering students in the Southeast Region that almost earned our Best Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region award.
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).