2025 Best Systems Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools
5Colleges in the United States
157Doctor's Degrees
Systems Engineering is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #115 most popular doctor's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 5 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Systems Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 157 doctor's degrees in systems engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Systems Engineering School for Your Doctor's Degree
The systems engineering doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality systems 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 include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host 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 much a school focuses on systems engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other systems 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 much debt systems engineering students go into to obtain their doctor'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 systems engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for systems engineering students working on their doctor'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 Systems Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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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 systems engineering doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality systems engineering program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
