The 14 Hardest and Easiest Engineering Majors Ranked

Author’s Note: This article is based on a longer research paper. The paper can be accessed for details.

Engineering degrees are unanimously considered to be among the toughest college majors out there. But among the various disciplines, which engineering major is the hardest?

As a chemical engineer myself, I recall speculating about this with my classmates from time to time, usually in the middle of working on some brain-numbing homework assignment.

Since engineering students often take courses in each other’s disciplines, take courses in the same buildings, and study in the same areas – we keep tabs on how hard students in the other disciplines are working.

Overall, we all knew that our colleagues in other disciplines work hard, much harder than in non-engineering fields. But at the same time, there was a bit of playful competition as to whose homework and projects were the most rigorous.

The Classic Argument for Ranking Engineering Disciplines

The classical argument for ranking engineering disciplines for difficulty goes something like this.

Civil engineering is easiest because everyone has been exposed to buildings, bridges, etc since birth. Thinking about these, understanding the theory, and designing them therefore isn’t too difficult, since the intuition is already there. Moreover, civil engineers deal with visible and physical things (unlike chemical or electrical engineers).

Mechanical engineers are second easiest because cars and gears and the like are also highly intuitive, and also deal with the visible, physical realm. But since mechanical contraptions are often in motion, they are more complicated than static structures, and mechanical engineering is more complex than civil engineering.

Then, people will rank electrical and chemical engineering as hardest with the order depending on whether they think it’s harder to visualize chemical reactions or to think about electricity.

To me, this thinking does make sense, since as we’ll see, “the intuition” argument above, does generate roughly the same order as the data.

It makes sense to me that fields such as chemical or electrical engineering where students come in with almost no intuition on the phenomena, require much more learning and content to be mastered over the span of the engineering degree.

Having taken courses in civil, electrical, materials science, chemical, and bio-engineering; my personal ranking (prior to seeing the data) was: chemical and bioengineering as most difficult, then electrical engineering, followed by mechanical engineering, and in last, civil engineering.

Luckily, we don’t need to go off my speculations for this article.

Measuring Difficulty

Instead, I rely on data generated by college students themselves, as they rate courses they’ve completed. In these ratings, college students rate their courses on a 1-5 scale of difficulty. From these ratings, I estimate the share of the professors within each major that have a difficulty of at least 3 (medium).

My original dataset comes from almost 3 million student ratings from 200 universities.

My original dataset comes from almost 3 million student ratings from 200 universities.

I only rate majors with plenty of ratings per university and reviews from multiple universities. You can read more about my data process here as well as how it correlates with actual weekly study hours data.

Let’s jump in and see what the hardest and easiest engineering majors in America are.

Engineering Majors Ranked By Difficulty

This list ranks the engineering majors by the share of professors that are considered by students to be difficult.

If you compare the list for engineering to the full list for all majors, you will notice that all engineering majors are really hard. The 2nd easiest engineering major, Industrial Engineering, is ranked 48th out of 118 majors. One of the easiest majors among the engineering fields is actually among the hardest majors in all of college!

But according to the data I’ve collected, students who took Chemical Engineering classes rated their major as hardest with 80% of professors rated as difficult. This is followed by Electrical Engineering in second with 73%, and Aerospace Engineering in third with 71%.

Ranking easiest is Engineering Technology (45%), followed by industrial engineering (53%), and biological engineering (56%).

You will notice that the “intuition” argument for difficulty would get the order roughly right. Another interesting fact, is that more difficult engineering majors earn more than less difficult ones.

Have you taken courses in multiple engineering disciplines? How does this list compare to your personal experience?

Similar Posts

• The 26 Highest and Lowest Paying Engineering Majors
• The Hardest and Easiest College Majors – 144 Majors Ranked
• The 78 Highest and Lowest Paying STEM Majors
• How to Ace College – Techniques that Boost Learning

For Students Considering Majoring in Engineering

Engineering majors are hard, but don’t think that they’re impossible. Genius is not required.

On the other hand persistence and a willingness to work harder than you’ve ever worked before in your life are absolutely critical.

Even though the courses are rigorous and study schedules intense, engineers look back on their training with fondness. Kind of like the Navy Seal who successfully completes Hell Week.

One tip I hope is helpful, is to be intentional with the way you approach your courses and studying. One book I wish I read when I was in college was Cal Newport’s How to Be a Straight-A Student. I discovered it after my undergrad and it’s been hugely helpful in graduate school in shaping how I think about learning.

Since that first book, I’ve read a lot about efficient learning techniques and the learning process – I summarize my ideas here.