If you pursue a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #17 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2023 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in South Carolina to determine which ones were the best for mechanical engineering students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 586 bachelor's degrees in mechanical engineering during the 2020-2021 academic year.
Choosing a Great Mechanical Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of mechanical engineering for getting your bachelor'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. 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 make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to mechanical engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other mechanical engineering students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How much debt mechanical engineering students go into to obtain their bachelor'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 colleges for mechanical engineering students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Mechanical Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in South Carolina ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
Best Schools for Bachelor’s Students to Study Mechanical Engineering in South Carolina
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering.
It is hard to beat Clemson University if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Located in the large suburb of Clemson, Clemson is a public university with a very large student population.
Those mechanical engineering students who get their bachelor's degree from Clemson University make $4,429 more than the standard ME student.
Every student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering has to look into University of South Carolina - Columbia. UofSC is a very large public university located in the city of Columbia.
Mechanical Engineering bachelor's degree recipients from University of South Carolina - Columbia earn a boost of approximately $2,663 above the average earnings of mechanical engineering graduates.
It is hard to beat Citadel Military College of South Carolina if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Located in the medium-sized city of Charleston, The Citadel is a public college with a small student population.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the ME program earn an average of $54,877 for their early career.
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).