MIT’s graduate program in engineering has again been ranked as the best in the nation in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings. The Institute has held the No. 1 spot since 1990, when the magazine first ranked such programs.
In the annual U.S. News ranking of the nation’s graduate programs in business, the MIT Sloan School of Management was ranked No. 5, also unchanged from last year.
U.S. News awarded MIT a score of 100 among graduate programs in engineering, followed by No. 2 Stanford University (92), No. 3 University of California at Berkeley (86), and No. 4 California Institute of Technology (79).
MIT’s graduate programs lead U.S. News lists this year in six engineering disciplines: aerospace engineering; chemical engineering; computer engineering (tied with Stanford and Berkeley); electrical/electronic/communications engineering (tied with Stanford); materials engineering; and mechanical engineering. Two other MIT graduate programs were also top-five finishers: nuclear engineering, at No. 2, and biomedical engineering, which tied for No. 4 with Duke University.
In the rankings of graduate programs in business, MIT Sloan ranked fifth, behind Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.
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.
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 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. 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.
