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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 10 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Systems Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 473 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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college'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 complete 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.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Systems Engineering Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Any student who is interested in a master's degree in systems engineering needs to take a look at University of Florida. UF is a very large public university located in the city of Gainesville.
Soon after graduation, systems engineering master's recipients typically make around $107,972 in the first five years of their career.
It is hard to beat University of Virginia - Main Campus if you want to pursue a master's degree in systems engineering. University of Virginia is a very large public university located in the midsize suburb of Charlottesville.
Those systems engineering students who get their master's degree from University of Virginia - Main Campus earn $2,227 more than the typical systems engineering student.
Georgia Institute of Technology - Main Campus is a good choice for students interested in a master's degree in systems engineering. Georgia Tech is a very large public school located in the city of Atlanta.
Those systems engineering students who get their master's degree from Georgia Institute of Technology - Main Campus earn $5,398 more than the typical systems engineering student.
Located in the large suburb of Fairfax, GMU is a public university with a very large student population.
Systems Engineering master's degree recipients from George Mason University get an earnings boost of about $3,693 over the average income of systems engineering graduates.
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).