The Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering has seen overall increases in both undergraduate and graduate student enrollment in recent years. In this past year, continued enrollment growth was noted for our Undergraduate programs. During the Fall 2025 semester, enrollment was up 12.0% over the previous year. Our graduate student enrollment in CEE programs is holding steady compared to the previous years despite national declines. Part of these increases were driven by a 2.7% increase in the size of the freshmen class, and a 10.9% increase in female students in the department. Additionally, the number of students from historically underrepresented ethnic minority groups in the department increased by 23.6% over the Fall 2024 semester.
These increases in students from underrepresented demographic groups are in line with our most recent data. In the past five years, the number of women in CEE’s undergraduate programs has increased 124%, and the number of women in CEE’s graduate programs has increased 65%. The number of CEE students from historically underrepresented ethnic minority groups has increased 64% in undergraduate programs and 43% in graduate programs.
In addition to increases in enrollment, CEE has made progress on one-year retention rates. The department’s one-year in-major retention rate for the Fall 2024 cohort was 68.8%, compared to 67.8% for the Fall 2023 cohort and 62.8% for the Fall 2022 cohort.
The ranking of both of our civil and environmental engineering graduate programs has increased in 2025. Our Civil Engineering graduate program rose to #51 nationally in 2025 (We were #58 in 2024). For Environmental Engineering, we rose to #54 in 2025 compared with #62 in 2024. The peer evaluation score for our civil engineering program remained at 2.8, while our peer evaluation score for the environmental engineering program increased from 2.6 to 2.7.
The department’s growth in rankings is due to the collective hard work in research and teaching, as well as implementing retention and communication strategies.
