The Vanderbilt School of Engineering is No. 38 in the 2019 U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges rankings released today. The school is tied with Arizona State University, Brown University, University of Virginia, and Washington University-St. Louis. MIT is ranked No. 1.
The U.S. News rankings of the 206 undergraduate engineering programs accredited by ABET, and where the highest engineering degree offered is a doctorate, are based solely on the judgments of deans and senior faculty at peer institutions. Two peer assessment surveys were sent to each ABET-accredited engineering program. There was a 58 percent return on the surveys.
In specialty engineering areas, Vanderbilt’s biomedical engineering program ranked No. 25. Thirty biomedical engineering programs were ranked by the magazine.
The Best Colleges ranking is derived from 16 measures of academic quality, including first-year student retention, graduation rates and the strength of the faculty, as well as peer universities’ and high school counselors’ assessments. U.S. News used the two most recent years’ responses to calculate weighted average scores of programs.
Vanderbilt University has retained its No. 14 spot in the latest rankings. The magazine also named Vanderbilt as one of the “best values” among national universities, ranking it seventh in the nation, up five spots from last year.