Engineering Degree Programs in Canada

The number of engineering disciplines is, perhaps, much larger than is commonly known.

The Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB), a standing committee of Engineers Canada, publishes an annual list of accredited Canadian engineering programs. The list changes slightly from year to year as new programs are created or old ones are dropped, but the long-term trend is of a gradually increasing number of programs.

A list of engineering specializations can be obtaind from the CEAB data by equating equivalent French and English names, counting joint programs as one, and then removing all duplicates. The most common programs make up a significant fraction of the total but, even assuming that programs with similar names are similar in detail, there is a considerable variety of engineering specializations.

The figure below shows the names and number of occurrences of program names that appear two or more times in the CEAB list and, at the bottom, the large number of programs with unique names. This figure is a revised and adapted equivalent of Figure 1.2 in Introduction to Professional Engineering in Canada, (fifth edition) by Andrews, Aplevich, Rraser, and MacGregor, Pearson Education, 2019.

Names of accredited Canadian engineering programs in 2021. Of the 282 names of accredited programs published by the CEAB, many are duplicates but 76 are distinct; the 20 that occur more than once are listed on the left, with the bottom row showing that each of 56 others is unique. Mechanical engineering, found at 37 institutions, has the largest count. The cumulative percent line shows that the most common three names account for more than a third of the total and the most common five make up more than 50 %.