2025 Best Petroleum Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region
2Colleges in the Southwest Region
66Doctor's Degrees
a doctor's degree in petroleum engineering is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #104 out of 306 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 2 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for petroleum engineering students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 66 doctor's degrees in petroleum engineering during the 2021-2022 academic year.
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 many resources a school devotes to petroleum engineering students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of petroleum 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.
Student Debt - How easy is it for petroleum engineering to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized petroleum engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for petroleum engineering students working on their doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Petroleum Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Petroleum Engineering in the Southwest Region
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in petroleum engineering.
Top Southwest Region Schools for a Doctorate in Petroleum Engineering
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.