If you're seeking a Bachelor's Degree in nuclear engineering, you will have fewer peers than average since the major degree program is the #219 one in the country in terms of popularity.While this may limit the number of schools that offer the degree program, there are still top-quality ones to be found.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Nuclear Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 80 bachelor's degrees in nuclear engineering to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Nuclear Engineering School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The nuclear engineering bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality nuclear 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 bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of different 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 bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor'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 nuclear engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of nuclear engineering students who choose to seek a bachelor'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.
Student Debt - How much debt nuclear 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 nuclear engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for nuclear 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 Nuclear Engineering Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
Best Schools for Bachelor’s Students to Study Nuclear Engineering in the Great Lakes Region
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering.
Top Great Lakes Region Schools for a Bachelor's in Nuclear Engineering
Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering needs to look into University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. UIUC is a fairly large public university located in the city of Champaign.
Bachelor's recipients from the nuclear engineering program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign make $8,954 more than the typical college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Every student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering has to look into Purdue University - Main Campus. Located in the city of West Lafayette, Purdue is a public university with a fairly large student population.
After graduation, nuclear engineering bachelor's recipients generally make about $63,226 in their early careers.
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).
The nuclear engineering bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality nuclear 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:
