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 a 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 the remaining programs exhibit a considerable variety of engineering specializations, even assuming that those with similar names are similar in detail.

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 updated equivalent to Figure 1.2 in Introduction to Professional Engineering in Canada, (fifth edition) by Andrews, Aplevich, Rraser, and MacGregor, Pearson Education, 2019.

Name counts of accredited Canadian engineering programs in 2024. Of the 302 accredited programs listed by the CEAB, many are duplicates but there are 85 different names; the 21 that occur more than once are listed on the left, with the bottom row showing that the other 64 are unique. Electrical engineering and Mechanical engineering, each found at 38 institutions, have the largest counts. 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 approximately 50 %.