MIT’s graduate program in engineering has been ranked No. 1 in the country in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings — a spot the Institute has held since 1990, when the magazine first ranked graduate programs in engineering.
U.S. News awarded MIT a score of 100 among graduate programs in engineering, followed by No. 2 Stanford University (93), No. 3 University of California at Berkeley (87), and No. 4 California Institute of Technology (80).
As was the case last year, MIT’s graduate programs led U.S. News lists in seven engineering disciplines. Top-ranked at MIT this year are programs in aerospace engineering; chemical engineering; materials engineering; computer engineering; electrical engineering (tied with Stanford and Berkeley); mechanical engineering (tied with Stanford); and nuclear engineering (tied with the University of Michigan). MIT’s graduate program in biomedical engineering was also a top-five finisher, tying for third with the University of California at San Diego.
In U.S. News’ first evaluation of PhD programs in the sciences since 2010, five MIT programs earned a No. 1 ranking: biological sciences (tied with Harvard University and Stanford); chemistry (tied with Caltech and Berkeley, and with a No. 1 ranking in the specialty of inorganic chemistry); computer science (tied with Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, and Berkeley); mathematics (tied with Princeton University, and with a No. 1 ranking in the specialty of discrete mathematics and combinations); and physics. MIT’s graduate program in earth sciences was ranked No. 2.
The MIT Sloan School of Management ranked fifth this year among the nation’s top business schools, behind Harvard Business School, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.
Sloan’s graduate programs in information systems, production/operations, and supply chain/logistics were again ranked first this year; the Institute’s graduate offerings in entrepreneurship (No. 3) and finance (No. 5) also ranked among top-five programs.
U.S. News does not issue annual rankings for all doctoral programs, but revisits many every few years. In the magazine’s 2013 evaluation of graduate programs in economics, MIT tied for first place with Harvard, Princeton, and Chicago.
U.S. News bases its rankings of graduate schools of engineering and business on two types of data: reputational surveys of deans and other academic officials, and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school’s faculty, research, and students. The magazine’s less-frequent rankings of programs in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are based solely on reputational surveys.