If you plan on getting your master's degree in systems engineering, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #67 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Systems Engineering Master's Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 291 master's degrees in systems engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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. 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 account for this we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination 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 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 colleges 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 California.
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Every student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in systems engineering has to check out University of Southern California. Located in the city of Los Angeles, USC is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Soon after graduation, systems engineering master's recipients typically make about $118,363 in the first five 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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
