Stanford places 20th in the 2026 College Transitions ranking of undergraduate electrical and computer engineering (ECE) programs. Remove the two components that measure a program’s scale and how central ECE is to its institution, rank all 301 programs again on student quality, graduate earnings and doctoral output alone, and Stanford moves to sixth.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign goes the other way, from seventh to 28th. Purdue falls from 10th to 36th.
Both results come from one design choice. This ranking gives a quarter of its weight to program scale and emphasis, on the view that a large, central department signals depth. That view is defensible, and a family is free to decline it. Below are the top 25, a breakdown of where each program’s score comes from, and the same list with those two components taken out, so a counselor can put whichever version fits the student’s question on the table.
Electrical and Computer Engineering Is Counted Under Two Federal Codes
IPEDS, the federal database of degree completions, records electrical engineering bachelor’s degrees under CIP code 14.10 and computer engineering under 14.09. Universities split across the two codes in different ways. Some award a single ECE degree. Others, including Illinois, Purdue, Georgia Tech, Michigan and Virginia Tech, offer electrical engineering and computer engineering as separate majors, and each major reports under its own code.
Ranking either code by itself would cut those departments in half and drop single-degree programs from one list or the other. This ranking adds the two codes together. The National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates likewise adopted electrical and computer engineering as a combined major field in its revised 2021 field taxonomy.
The universe is every institution that awarded at least 20 ECE bachelor’s degrees, both codes combined, over the three most recent years of IPEDS data (fiscal years 2022 through 2024). That comes to 356 institutions, of which 301 had enough data to score.
For counselors, this has one practical consequence. At a university with two separate majors, the figures here describe both together. A student deciding between electrical and computer engineering at the same school should compare the two curricula directly, because the ranking does not separate them.
What Goes Into the Score
Each program is scored on five components. Every component is converted to a percentile among the 301 scored programs and then weighted.
| Component | Weight | What it measures | Source and years |
| Major Emphasis | 12% | ECE degrees as a share of all degrees the institution awarded | IPEDS Completions, 2022 to 2024 |
| Program Scale | 13% | Number of ECE bachelor’s degrees (log scale) | IPEDS Completions, 2022 to 2024 |
| Academic Rating | 30% | Nine indicators: SAT/ACT midpoint, retention, graduation rate, graduation rate relative to prediction, student-faculty ratio, share of classes under 20, professor salary, full-time faculty share, terminal-degree share | IPEDS; College Transitions Common Data Set panel |
| Earnings & ROI | 25% | Median earnings of ECE bachelor’s completers, measured several years after completion (55%), institution-wide median earnings (15%), net ROI at 20 years (15%) and 40 years (15%) | College Scorecard; Georgetown CEW |
| PhD Productivity | 20% | ECE doctorates earned by alumni, half raw count and half rate per 1,000 undergraduates | NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2015 to 2024 |
Table 1. Ranking components, weights and data sources.
Two scoring rules shape the results. Field-specific ECE earnings were published for 74.7 percent of programs, since College Scorecard suppresses figures for small cohorts. And a program with no ECE doctorate recipients in the NSF data scores zero on PhD Productivity rather than being left out of that component. Ninety of the 301 programs fall in that group, including three in the top 100 (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Binghamton and the University of Connecticut).
The Top 25
Carnegie Mellon leads with a score of 93.1, followed by Duke at 91.2 and MIT at 90.1. The full top 25 spans 13.0 points, from Carnegie Mellon down to the University of Virginia at 80.1. Ranks are set on unrounded scores, so Michigan (85.03) sits one place above Cornell (85.00) and Florida (80.22) one place above UT Austin (80.21), even though each pair displays as a tie.
| Rank | Institution | State | Control | ECE degrees, 2022-24 | Score |
| 1 | Carnegie Mellon University | PA | Private | 515 | 93.1 |
| 2 | Duke University | NC | Private | 320 | 91.2 |
| 3 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MA | Private | 190 | 90.1 |
| 4 | Georgia Institute of Technology | GA | Public | 939 | 88.6 |
| 5 | University of California, Berkeley | CA | Public | 1,446 | 87.7 |
| 6 | Princeton University | NJ | Private | 123 | 87.3 |
| 7 | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | IL | Public | 1,702 | 85.9 |
| 8 | University of Michigan | MI | Public | 649 | 85.0 |
| 9 | Cornell University | NY | Private | 250 | 85.0 |
| 10 | Purdue University | IN | Public | 1,574 | 84.4 |
| 11 | Stevens Institute of Technology | NJ | Private | 376 | 84.2 |
| 12 | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | NY | Private | 244 | 84.0 |
| 13 | University of California, San Diego | CA | Public | 1,128 | 83.4 |
| 14 | Northeastern University | MA | Private | 629 | 83.0 |
| 15 | Boston University | MA | Private | 395 | 82.8 |
| 16 | University of Notre Dame | IN | Private | 196 | 82.1 |
| 17 | Virginia Tech | VA | Public | 931 | 82.0 |
| 18 | Santa Clara University | CA | Private | 305 | 81.8 |
| 19 | University of Maryland, College Park | MD | Public | 630 | 81.6 |
| 20 | Stanford University | CA | Private | 113 | 81.4 |
| 21 | University of California, Los Angeles | CA | Public | 679 | 81.3 |
| 22 | Worcester Polytechnic Institute | MA | Private | 234 | 80.9 |
| 23 | University of Florida | FL | Public | 654 | 80.2 |
| 24 | University of Texas at Austin | TX | Public | 974 | 80.2 |
| 25 | University of Virginia | VA | Public | 214 | 80.1 |
Table 2. Top 25 undergraduate ECE programs, 2026. ECE degrees are bachelor’s degrees under CIP 14.09 and 14.10 combined, fiscal years 2022 through 2024. Source: College Transitions 2026 ECE Ranking; IPEDS Completions.
Carnegie Mellon Is the Only Leader Without a Weak Component
Figure 1 breaks each top-25 score into the points contributed by its five components. Carnegie Mellon’s bar is the longest, and its segments show why. Its lowest component percentile is 88.5, on Academic Rating. No other program in the top 25 has a floor above 76.4, which is Duke’s Program Scale.
Figure 1. Composite score by component, top 25 programs. Points equal the component percentile times the component weight. Source: College Transitions 2026 ECE Ranking.
The other leaders get there with a mix of peaks and gaps. Duke’s Academic Rating of 94.6 is the second highest among all 301 programs, behind Princeton’s 94.9. MIT holds the top PhD Productivity score in the ranking (98.8) and ties Princeton for the top Earnings & ROI score (99.6), yet its Program Scale percentile is 60.3. MIT awarded 190 ECE bachelor’s degrees over three years.
Princeton shows the pattern more sharply. It has the highest Academic Rating in the ranking and shares the highest earnings score, and it ranks sixth because its Program Scale sits at the 46.7th percentile (123 degrees in three years) and its Major Emphasis at 73.4.
Stanford is the extreme case. Its 113 ECE degrees over three years, 2.3 percent of all degrees Stanford awarded in that window, produce the lowest Program Scale in the top 25 (43.9) and a Major Emphasis of 56.1. Its other three components run from 85.8 to 98.5.
The large public programs build their scores from the opposite direction. Illinois (1,702 ECE degrees), Purdue (1,574), Berkeley (1,446) and Georgia Tech (939) all score 96 or higher on Program Scale. Only Ohio State, ranked 31st overall, produced more ECE graduates in the period, with 1,936.
Remove Scale and Emphasis, and the Order Changes
Together, Major Emphasis and Program Scale can contribute up to 25 points. Among the top 25 they contribute between 12.4 points (Stanford) and 24.0 (Illinois), a spread of 11.6. The whole top 25 spans 13.0. Scale and departmental emphasis alone, in other words, can move a program across nearly the full width of the top tier.
Figure 2 re-ranks all 301 programs using only Academic Rating, Earnings & ROI and PhD Productivity, each keeping its original weight relative to the other two, and shows where the published top 25 land.
Figure 2. Published rank against rank on quality and outcome components only, among all 301 programs. Calculated by College Transitions from the 2026 ECE Ranking component scores.
Stanford rises 14 places to sixth. Virginia rises 18 places to seventh, and Notre Dame seven places to ninth. Princeton moves to first.
The falls run deeper. Illinois drops 21 places to 28th, Purdue 26 places to 36th, Virginia Tech 21 places to 38th, UC San Diego 20 places to 33rd and UT Austin 16 places to 40th. Each is a public university with a Program Scale above the 95th percentile.
Programs outside the published top 25 fill the gaps. On quality and outcomes alone, Northwestern ranks eighth (published rank 41), Caltech 13th (published 36th), Johns Hopkins 15th (52nd) and Harvard 22nd (78th). Harvard’s Major Emphasis and Program Scale percentiles are 1.0 and 2.3.
Which list to use depends on what a student wants from a department. The published ranking treats a large ECE program, and one that is central to its institution, as a strength in itself. A student who prefers a smaller department, or who is choosing mainly on selectivity and graduate outcomes, has less reason to share that assumption, and the right-hand column of Figure 2 is the better guide for that student.
Big Public Campuses Send the Most Graduates to ECE Doctorates
The PhD component counts ECE doctorates awarded from 2015 through 2024 to each institution’s alumni, weighting the raw count and the rate per 1,000 undergraduates equally. Figure 3 plots it against Academic Rating for the top 100.
Figure 3. Academic Rating against PhD Productivity, top 100 programs (three with no NSF doctoral record omitted). Source: College Transitions 2026 ECE Ranking; NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2015 to 2024.
Illinois produced the most ECE doctorate recipients in the period, 194, followed by Purdue (136), Berkeley (130), Georgia Tech (125) and Michigan (108). Each of those five sent more graduates on to ECE doctorates than any private university in the top 100, MIT (96) included. All five sit between the 66th and 81st percentiles on Academic Rating and above the 93rd on PhD Productivity.
MIT still leads PhD Productivity overall because it pairs a large count with a rate of 21.0 doctorates per 1,000 undergraduates. Among top-100 programs, only Caltech (53.7) and Cooper Union (22.2) post higher rates.
Across the top 100, the two measures are only loosely related, with a correlation of 0.45. Harvard sits at the 93.7th percentile on Academic Rating and the 81.7th on PhD Productivity. Santa Clara, 18th overall, sits at 64.7 on PhD Productivity.
For a student already thinking about a doctorate, this is the chart to show. Several of the largest public programs put more alumni into ECE doctorates than the private leaders do, despite lower Academic Ratings. The data count alumni who finished a PhD. They say nothing about any one student’s odds of admission to a doctoral program.
The Earnings Figures at the Top Come From Small Groups
The Earnings & ROI component is anchored by College Scorecard’s median earnings for ECE bachelor’s completers, measured several years after completion rather than at graduation. The highest figures in the top 100 belong to Princeton ($227,172), Berkeley ($202,911), MIT ($172,897), the University of Washington ($168,957), Santa Clara ($159,782), Stanford ($154,251) and Carnegie Mellon ($149,740).
Two features of Scorecard data shape those numbers. The field-of-study median includes only graduates who are working and not enrolled at the measurement point, so anyone still in graduate school then is excluded. Scorecard also suppresses earnings when a cohort does not meet its privacy and data-quality requirements, and it applies privacy protections to the figures it does publish. For a relatively small program such as Princeton’s, with 123 ECE degrees over three years, the published figure describes only the eligible earnings cohort, not every graduate. And because it is measured years after completion, it should not be read as a typical starting salary.
The top earners are also spread across the map. They include programs in the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, Pittsburgh and central New Jersey, with Duke ($137,144) and Virginia ($135,287) eighth and ninth in the top 100. San Jose State, ranked 69th overall, reports $127,047, above Cornell’s $118,743.
Field earnings make up 55 percent of the component. The rest comes from institution-wide median earnings and Georgetown’s 20- and 40-year return-on-investment estimates, which describe all of a school’s graduates rather than its ECE majors.
Two Offers, Two Lists
Picture a counselor with a student holding offers from Purdue and Notre Dame. In the published ranking, Purdue is 10th and Notre Dame 16th. On quality and outcomes alone, Notre Dame is ninth and Purdue 36th.
Purdue graduated 1,574 ECE majors over three years, about 525 a year, and trails only Illinois among top-100 programs in alumni who went on to ECE doctorates. Notre Dame graduated 196, about 65 a year, and carries the higher Academic Rating, 89.8 against 73.2. The first question to ask that student is whether they want a department of 500 graduates a year or one of 65. The answer tells you which column to read.
Ask that question before showing a family either list.
Data sources: College Transitions 2026 Undergraduate Electrical and Computer Engineering Ranking, compiled March 2026. IPEDS Completions, CIP 14.09 and 14.10 combined, bachelor’s degrees, fiscal years 2022 through 2024. U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, field-of-study median earnings for CIP 14.09 and 14.10 at the bachelor’s level (higher of the two used) and institution-level median earnings 10 years after entry. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, net return on investment at 20 and 40 years. National Science Foundation, Survey of Earned Doctorates, electrical and computer engineering, 2015 through 2024. Academic Rating indicators from IPEDS and the College Transitions Common Data Set panel. Universe: 356 institutions awarding at least 20 combined ECE bachelor’s degrees over 2022 through 2024; 301 scored. All percentiles are computed within the 301 scored programs. Public or private control reflects the institution, not the department.
