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/electronic/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.