Systems Engineering is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #67 most popular master'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.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 2 schools in Pennsylvania to determine which ones were the best for systems engineering students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 160 master's degrees in systems engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
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.
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 Master's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania 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
