Systems Engineering is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #115 most popular doctor's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2024 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in the Middle Atlantic Region to determine which ones were the best for systems engineering students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 23 doctor's degrees in systems engineering during the 2020-2021 academic year.
Choosing a Great Systems Engineering School for Your Doctor's Degree
The systems engineering doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality systems engineering program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 account for this we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection 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 systems engineering students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other systems 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 systems 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 systems engineering related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for systems engineering students working on their doctor's degree.
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 Systems Engineering Doctor's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region list to help you make the college decision.
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Featured Systems Engineering Programs
Learn about start dates, transferring credits, availability of financial aid, and more by contacting the universities below.
George Washington University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in systems engineering. Located in the large city of Washington, GWU is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
After graduation, systems engineering doctorate recipients generally make around $160,692 in the first five years of their 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).
college factual
The systems engineering doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality systems engineering program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
