If you plan on getting your master's degree in engineering, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #6 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual reviewed 4 schools in Virginia to determine which ones were the best for master's degree seekers in the field of engineering. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,064 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
The engineering master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality engineering program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master'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 Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master'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 master'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 engineering students go into to obtain their master'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 colleges for engineering students working on their master's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Engineering Master's Degree Schools in Virginia list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
The engineering master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality engineering program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
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