Lamar University produces some of the highest-paid engineers in the country — in fact, a diploma from LU often leads to salaries of $75,000 or more within five years of graduation.

Facts like this helped land Lamar University in the 20^th spot among the Top 50 Best Value Engineering Schools for 2018 in the nation, as reported by BestValueSchools.com.

PayScale.com ranked Lamar as the second-best undergraduate engineering university by salary. But many LU engineering students don’t wait until they graduate to start earning as the College of Engineering’s co-op program allows students to alternate semesters between classes and paid internships in their field.

LU also supports its undergraduate engineering students with more than $4 million dollars in need- and merit-based scholarships for undergraduates.

A 2015 study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported engineering is an excellent career choice. Of the Top 10 highest-earning majors for the class of 2015, all of them were in engineering.

Selecting schools for the list used a ranking methodology that started with the College Navigator database to assemble a list of all the four-year, public and non-profit (no for-profit schools were included) colleges and universities in the United States that offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering.

More than 500 fit these criteria, so the list was pared by limiting the results to schools with a maximum annual tuition of $25,000 (including in-state and out-of-state rates). From the nearly 300 remaining candidates, only those with ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accreditation were selected.

Those that remained — about 170 — were further evaluated on four main indicators:

• Number of accredited programs in engineering
• Percentage of degrees awarded by the university in STEM fields
• Early career salaries earned by its graduates
• Overall net price of attending.

For the full listing, visit https://www.bestvalueschools.com/rankings/engineering-schools/.