In the News

MIT’s graduate program in engineering has once more placed at the top of U.S. News & World Report’s annual list of the nation’s graduate programs. The Institute has held the No. 1 spot since 1990, when the magazine first ranked such programs.

The MIT Sloan School of Management also placed highly, coming in as the No. 5 graduate program in business for the third year in a row.

MIT’s graduate program in engineering was the only one to earn an overall score of 100. It was followed by Stanford University (87), the University of California at Berkeley (81), and Caltech (75).

The U.S. News list also ranked individual engineering disciplines across universities; top honors went to MIT for aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, computer engineering, electrical/electronics/communications engineering (tied with Stanford and Berkeley), materials engineering, and mechanical engineering (tied with Stanford). MIT also received the No. 2 ranking in nuclear engineering and biomedical engineering (tied with Georgia Tech).

In the rankings of graduate programs in business, MIT Sloan ranked fifth, behind programs at Harvard University, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania.

MIT Sloan’s graduate programs in information systems, production/operations, and supply chain/logistics were again ranked first this year; the Institute’s graduate program in entrepreneurship was also highly ranked, at No. 3 (tied with Harvard).

U.S. News does not issue annual rankings for all doctoral programs, but revisits many every few years. In the magazine’s 2014 evaluation of PhD programs in the sciences, five MIT programs earned a No. 1 ranking: biological sciences (tied with Harvard 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. In a 2013 evaluation of graduate programs in economics, MIT tied for first place with Harvard, Princeton, and Chicago, with a No. 1 ranking in the specialty of econometrics.

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.