If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in engineering, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #6 in the country in terms of popularity. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 30 schools in California to determine which ones were the best for engineering students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 14,391 bachelor's degrees in engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The engineering bachelor'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
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 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 bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor'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 - How many other engineering students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
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 bachelor'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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for engineering students working on their bachelor'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 Bachelor's Degree Schools in California.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in engineering has to take a look at Santa Clara University. Located in the city of Santa Clara, SCU is a private not-for-profit university with a moderately-sized student population.More information about a bachelor’s in engineering from Santa Clara 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).