2023 Schools for a Master’s Highly Focused on Petroleum Engineering Major in California

When it comes to choosing a college, students have a lot of options - but not all of them are good. College Factual has developed its “Schools for a Master’s Highly Focused on Petroleum Engineering Major in California” ranking as one item you can use to help make this decision.

Petroleum Engineering is the 223rd most popular major in the country with 1,256 degrees awarded in 2020-2021. In 2019-2020, petroleum engineering graduates who were awarded their degree in 2017-2019, earned an average of $83,917 and had an average of $25,780 in loans still to pay off.

Across California, there were 25 petroleum engineering graduates with average earnings and debt of $0 and $0 respectively. At the master’s degree level specifically, there were 21 petroleum engineering graduates with average earnings and debt of $62,974 and $0 respectively.

This year’s “Schools for a Master’s Highly Focused on Petroleum Engineering Major in California” ranking looked at 2 colleges that offer degrees in a bachelor’s in petroleum engineering. This a ranking of the schools where the largest percentage of students has enrolled in petroleum engineering.

See our ranking methodology to learn more.

More Ways to Rank Petroleum Engineering Schools

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 “Schools for a Master’s Highly Focused on Petroleum Engineering Major in California” list to help you make the college decision.

You can create your own custom comparison that focuses on the factors most important to you using our tool, College Combat. We encourage you to try it out and pit your favorite colleges and universities head to head! If you don’t have time right now, you can bookmark it for later.

Schools for a Master’s Highly Focused on Petroleum Engineering Major in California

The following schools top our list of the Best “Schools for a Master’s Highly Focused on Petroleum Engineering Major in California”.

Top 2 Most Focused Master’s Degree Colleges for Petroleum Engineering in California

1

University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California

#4 overall quality in California

Out of the 2 schools in the Schools for a Master’s Highly Focused on Petroleum Engineering Major in California that were part of this year’s ranking, University of Southern California landed the #1 spot on the list. This large school is located in Los Angeles, California, and it awarded 19 masters’s petroleum engineering degrees in 2020-2021.

With a undergrad student-to-faculty ratio of 9 to 1, it’s easy to see that the school is committed to helping their undergraduates succeed. The school has an excellent freshman retention rate of 91%, which means students like the school well enough to return for a second year. The low undergrad student loan default rate of 1.3% is a good sign that students have an easier time paying off their loans than they might at other schools. For comparison, the national default rate is 10.1%.

Read full report on Petroleum Engineering at University of Southern California

2

Stanford University
Stanford, California

#1 overall quality in California

Out of the 2 schools in the Schools for a Master’s Highly Focused on Petroleum Engineering Major in California that were part of this year’s ranking, Stanford University landed the #2 spot on the list. Stanford University is a fairly large private not-for-profit school situated in Stanford, California. It awarded 2 masters’s petroleum engineering degrees in 2020-2021.

Students who start out at the school are likely to stick around. The freshman retention rate is 86%. The undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio of 4 to 1 is a sign that students will have more opportunities to engage with their professors one-on-one. The undergrad student loan default rate at the school is 0.5%, which is quite low when compared to the national default rate of 10.1%.

Full Stanford University Petroleum Engineering Report

• Most Focused Master’s Degree Colleges for Petroleum Engineering in the Far Western US Region
• Most Focused Master’s Degree Colleges for Petroleum Engineering

Notes and References

References

• 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 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).
• Information about the national average student loan default rate is from the U.S. Department of Education and refers to data about the 2016 borrower cohort tracking period for which the cohort default rate (CDR) was 10.1%.

Read more about our data sources and methodologies

Footnotes

• *Avg Salary and Avg 4-Year Grad Rate are for the top schools only.
• Some schools otherwise deserving of recognition may have been removed from this ranking in the event that new data identified post-publication warranted it, or at the request of the school.