2025 Best Chemical Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region
4Colleges in the Southwest Region
138Doctor's Degrees
If you pursue a doctor's degree in chemical engineering, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #27 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Chemical Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 138 doctor's degrees in chemical engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Choosing a Great Chemical Engineering School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of chemical engineering for getting your doctor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality chem eng 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
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 consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
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 chemical engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of chemical engineering students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
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.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized chemical engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for chemical engineering students working on their doctor's degree.
The chem eng 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 Chemical Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Chemical Engineering in the Southwest Region
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in chemical engineering.
Top Southwest Region Schools for a Doctorate in Chem Eng
Rice University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a doctor's degree in chemical engineering. Located in the large city of Houston, Rice is a private not-for-profit university with a moderately-sized student population.More information about a doctorate in chemical engineering from Rice University
Chemical Engineering is one of 2 different types of Chemical Engineering programs to choose from.
Notes and References
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).