a master's degree in systems engineering is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #67 out of 343 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.
College Factual looked at 5 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Systems Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 301 master's degrees in systems engineering to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Systems Engineering School for Your Master's Degree
The systems engineering master'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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a good 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 host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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
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 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 systems 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 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 master's degree.
The systems 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 Systems Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region.
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University of Southern California is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in systems engineering. Located in the large city of Los Angeles, USC is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
Master's students who receive their degree from the systems engineering program earn around $118,363 in the first couple years of their career.
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).
The systems engineering master'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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
