If you're seeking a degree in optical enginering, you will have fewer peers than average since the major degree program is the #923 one in the country in terms of popularity.This may make is a little harder to find a school that is a good fit for you.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Optical Enginering Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 138 degrees in optical enginering annually.
Your choice of optical enginering school matters, so we have put together these rankings to help you make your decision. In order to come up with a best overall ranking for optical enginering schools, we combine our degree-level rankings, weighting them by the number of degrees awarded at each level.
In order to find the schools that are the best fit for you, you may want to filter to one of the degree levels below.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Optical Enginering Schools list to help you make the college decision.
If you'd like to restrict your choices to just one part of the country, you can filter this list by location.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
Best Schools for Optical Enginering in the United States
The schools below may not offer all types of optical enginering degrees so you may want to filter by degree level first. However, they are great for the degree levels they do offer.
University of Rochester is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a degree in optical enginering. University of Rochester is a large private not-for-profit university located in the medium-sized city of Rochester. A Best Colleges rank of #82 out of 2,152 colleges nationwide means University of Rochester is a great university overall.
There were roughly 24 optical enginering students who graduated with this degree at University of Rochester in the most recent data year.
Any student who is interested in optical enginering has to look into University of Central Florida. Located in the suburb of Orlando, UCF is a public university with a fairly large student population. This university ranks 10th out of 70 schools for overall quality in the state of Florida.
There were roughly 75 optical enginering students who graduated with this degree at UCF in the most recent year we have data available.
University of Dayton is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a degree in optical enginering. Located in the medium-sized city of Dayton, UDayton is a private not-for-profit university with a large student population. This university ranks 8th out of 91 colleges for overall quality in the state of Ohio.
There were approximately 17 optical enginering students who graduated with this degree at UDayton in the most recent year we have data available.
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).
Your choice of optical enginering school matters, so we have put together these rankings to help you make your decision. In order to come up with a best overall ranking for optical enginering schools, we combine our degree-level rankings, weighting them by the number of degrees awarded at each level.
