2025 Best Mechanical Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region
3Colleges in the Rocky Mountains Region
89Doctor's Degrees
Ranked #17 in popularity, mechanical engineering is one of the most sought-after doctor's degree programs in the nation. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 3 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Mechanical Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 89 doctor's degrees in mechanical engineering during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Choosing a Great Mechanical Engineering School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of mechanical engineering for getting your doctor's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 school'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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor'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 mechanical engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other mechanical engineering students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor'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 mechanical engineering students go into to obtain their doctor'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 mechanical engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for mechanical engineering students working on their doctor's degree.
The me 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 Mechanical Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Mechanical Engineering in the Rocky Mountains Region
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in mechanical engineering.
Top Rocky Mountains Region Schools for a Doctorate in ME
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).