MIT stands fifth in the nation--down a notch from the past two years--in the latest US News & World Report ranking of 229 "national" universities.
In addition, MIT and Stanford were tied for having the best undergraduate engineering programs, while the Sloan School of Management was tied for No. 3 with several schools for having the best undergraduate business program. Tied for first were the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania.
MIT and the Sloan School were both No. 1 in the magazine's rankings last year of graduate engineering and business programs.
In this year's overall rankings, Stanford University, which was sixth last year, edged ahead of MIT with an overall score of 98.1 to MIT's 98.0.
In its annual survey, published this week, the magazine places Harvard at the top of the list for the sixth straight year, with an overall score of 100, followed by Princeton, Yale, Stanford and MIT in the top five. Rounding out the top 10 are Duke, the California Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College, Brown University and Johns Hopkins University.
New to the top 10 are Brown, which was No. 11 last year, and Johns Hopkins, which jumped from No. 22 last year. They displaced the University of Chicago (No. 11 this year) and Columbia University (No. 15).
To arrive at its rankings of national research-oriented schools, the magazine combines a school's academic reputation obtained through a survey of more than 2,700 college presidents, deans and admissions directors with educational data provided by the colleges themselves in the areas of selectivity, faculty resources, financial resources, student retention and alumni/ae satisfaction.
In the new rankings, MIT rates highest in academic reputation along with Harvard and Stanford.
The magazine said it ranked undergraduate engineering and business programs for the first time "because more and more students are choosing a school on the basis of the quality of a particular undergraduate major."
In the engineering rankings, MIT scored first in six of the "best departments:" aerospace, chemical, computer, electrical, mechanical and materials/metallurgical.
The Sloan School-which shared its No. 3 ranking with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill-was first in two of the undergraduate business school "best departments:" production/operations management and quantitative analysis.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 13, 1995.
