A nearby medical school is often treated as an advantage for an undergraduate biomedical engineering program. Duke has one, Johns Hopkins has one, and so do many of the programs near the top of BME rankings. It is a reasonable idea, but not one our data can test, because none of the five measures in this ranking describes a university’s medical center.
What the data can measure points somewhere else. With one exception, the top 10 programs in the 2026 College Transitions ranking sit in the top fifth of all 155 programs on the share of bachelor’s degrees that go to biomedical engineering (BME). At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, seventh overall, BME degrees equal more than one in ten of all bachelor’s degrees awarded. Harvard shows what the ranking rewards and penalizes: it has the second-highest Academic Rating in the field, but BME degrees equal just 0.7 percent of its bachelor’s degrees, and it ranks 44th.
This article presents the top 25, then looks at three things a family can read from the data: how central the field is on each campus, which schools send the most graduates to BME doctorates, and what graduates earn early in their careers.
How the Ranking Scores Biomedical Engineering
The ranking covers the federal CIP 14.05 family, Biomedical/Medical Engineering. A program qualifies with at least 12 bachelor’s degrees over fiscal years 2022 through 2024, and 155 institutions meet that bar. Each receives a percentile on five components, which are weighted into a composite.
| Component | Weight | What it measures | Source and years |
| Major Emphasis | 12% | BME degrees as a share of all bachelor’s degrees the institution awarded | IPEDS Completions, 2022 to 2024 |
| Program Scale | 13% | Number of BME bachelor’s degrees (log scale) | IPEDS Completions, 2022 to 2024 |
| Academic Rating | 30% | Nine indicators: SAT/ACT midpoint, retention, graduation rate, student-faculty ratio, share of classes under 20, professor salary, graduation rate relative to prediction, full-time faculty share, terminal-degree share | IPEDS; College Transitions Common Data Set panel |
| Earnings & ROI | 25% | BME graduates’ median earnings four years after completion (55%); institution-wide median earnings (15%); institution-level ROI at 20 years (15%) and 40 years (15%) | College Scorecard; Georgetown CEW |
| PhD Productivity | 20% | BME research doctorates earned by the institution’s bachelor’s-degree alumni, half raw count and half rate per 1,000 undergraduate enrollment | NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2015 to 2024 |
Table 1. Ranking components, weights and data sources.
Three scoring rules shape the results. College Scorecard publishes BME-specific earnings for 58.3 percent of the 155 programs; for the rest, that part of the Earnings & ROI component is set to the universe median, so the component separates programs mainly among those with published figures. The Georgetown return-on-investment estimates describe each institution as a whole, not its BME program. And a program with no record in the NSF doctoral data scores zero on PhD Productivity. Ten top-100 programs are in that position, including Washington University in St. Louis (ranked 48th) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (57th).
The Top 25
Duke leads at 92.2, followed by Johns Hopkins at 91.3 and MIT at 89.5. Ranks are set on unrounded scores. Penn (84.96) sits just above Worcester Polytechnic Institute (84.95) and Northwestern (84.87); Case Western (82.77) above Boston University (82.74) and Vanderbilt (82.71); and Lehigh above Caltech, though both display 75.6.
| Rank | Institution | State | Type | BME degrees, 2022-24 | Score |
| 1 | Duke University | NC | Private university | 246 | 92.2 |
| 2 | Johns Hopkins University | MD | Private university | 310 | 91.3 |
| 3 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MA | Private university | 147 | 89.5 |
| 4 | Georgia Institute of Technology | GA | Public university | 819 | 87.6 |
| 5 | University of Virginia | VA | Public university | 344 | 86.6 |
| 6 | University of Pennsylvania | PA | Private university | 155 | 85.0 |
| 7 | Worcester Polytechnic Institute | MA | Private university | 361 | 84.9 |
| 8 | Northwestern University | IL | Private university | 153 | 84.9 |
| 9 | Case Western Reserve University | OH | Private university | 279 | 82.8 |
| 10 | Boston University | MA | Private university | 379 | 82.7 |
| 11 | Vanderbilt University | TN | Private university | 145 | 82.7 |
| 12 | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | NY | Private university | 210 | 82.0 |
| 13 | University of Rochester | NY | Private university | 165 | 79.2 |
| 14 | University of Michigan | MI | Public university | 391 | 78.7 |
| 15 | University of California, San Diego | CA | Public university | 310 | 76.9 |
| 16 | Lehigh University | PA | Private university | 122 | 75.6 |
| 17 | California Institute of Technology | CA | Private university | 38 | 75.6 |
| 18 | Stevens Institute of Technology | NJ | Private university | 167 | 75.1 |
| 19 | North Carolina State University | NC | Public university | 448 | 74.1 |
| 20 | Stanford University | CA | Private university | 114 | 74.0 |
| 21 | Drexel University | PA | Private university | 288 | 73.8 |
| 22 | Cornell University | NY | Private university | 128 | 72.9 |
| 23 | University of California, Irvine | CA | Public university | 396 | 72.6 |
| 24 | University of Southern California | CA | Private university | 181 | 72.3 |
| 25 | University of California, Los Angeles | CA | Public university | 202 | 71.6 |
Table 2. Top 25 undergraduate biomedical engineering programs, 2026. BME degrees are bachelor’s degrees under CIP 14.05, fiscal years 2022 through 2024. Source: College Transitions 2026 Biomedical Engineering Ranking; IPEDS Completions.
Seven of the top 25 are public universities, led by Georgia Tech (4th) and Virginia (5th). The rest are private universities.
Concentration Separates the Leaders
Figure 1 sorts the top 25 by the share of each institution’s bachelor’s degrees that are in biomedical engineering, the quantity behind Major Emphasis.
Figure 1. Biomedical engineering as a share of all bachelor’s degrees awarded, fiscal years 2022 through 2024, top 25 programs. Source: IPEDS Completions, as compiled in the College Transitions 2026 Biomedical Engineering Ranking.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute leads at 10.4 percent, with 361 BME degrees out of 3,455 bachelor’s degrees in all fields, and holds the only perfect Major Emphasis score in the ranking. Johns Hopkins (7.3 percent), Case Western (7.1 percent), Georgia Tech (6.4 percent) and Stevens (6.1 percent) follow. Nine of the top 10 programs score 80 or higher on Major Emphasis. Penn, at 67.1, is the exception.
Georgia Tech combines that emphasis with size. Its 819 BME degrees over three years are the most in the ranking, well ahead of Texas A&M (467) and NC State (448), and give it the only perfect Program Scale score.
Harvard shows the other side of the same measures. It awarded 37 BME degrees over the three years, 0.7 percent of its bachelor’s degrees, which puts it at 15.5 on Major Emphasis and 12.9 on Program Scale. Its Academic Rating of 92.5 is second among all 155 programs, behind Duke’s 93.0. A student who places little weight on how large or central the major is can look past the composite and evaluate Harvard’s remaining components directly: Academic Rating (92.5), Earnings & ROI (69.9) and PhD Productivity (75.3).
Concentration is not required for a top-25 finish. UCLA, at 25th, has the lowest BME share in the top 25, also 0.7 percent, and reaches the list on Earnings & ROI (85.9) and PhD Productivity (85.2).
A Handful of Campuses Lead the BME Doctoral Pipeline
PhD Productivity counts BME research doctorates earned from 2015 through 2024 by each institution’s bachelor’s-degree alumni, weighting the raw count and the rate per 1,000 undergraduate enrollment equally. The rate is a campus-size normalization, a 10-year count of doctorates divided by current enrollment, not the percentage of an undergraduate cohort that later earns a BME doctorate. Of the 155 programs, 122 have at least one such doctorate on record.
By count, Johns Hopkins leads with 205, followed by UC Berkeley (183, ranked 36th overall), Georgia Tech (164), MIT (155), UC San Diego (148) and Duke (146). Figure 2 shows the rate, which reorders the list.
Figure 2. BME research doctorates per 1,000 undergraduate enrollment, 2015 through 2024, the 15 highest rates among top-100 programs. Source: NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates, as compiled in the College Transitions 2026 Biomedical Engineering Ranking.
Caltech’s alumni earned BME doctorates at a rate of 55.7 per 1,000 undergraduate enrollment, far ahead of MIT (33.9) and Johns Hopkins (33.7). Caltech awarded only 38 BME bachelor’s degrees over the three years, the source of its 13.9 on Program Scale and its 17th-place finish. Duke (22.5), Rice (18.8) and Case Western (18.6) come next. Georgia Tech is the only public university among the 15 highest rates, at 8.4, and it gets there on volume: its 164 doctorates are set against an enrollment of more than 19,000 undergraduates.
These figures describe where past doctorate recipients earned their bachelor’s degrees. They do not predict any one student’s path to a doctoral program.
Earnings Data Covers Only Part of the Field
The Earnings & ROI component draws 55 percent of its weight from College Scorecard’s median earnings for BME bachelor’s completers four years after completion. Figure 3 shows that figure for the 22 top-25 programs where it is published.
Figure 3. Median earnings of BME bachelor’s completers four years after completion, top-25 programs with a published figure. Source: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, as compiled in the College Transitions 2026 Biomedical Engineering Ranking.
MIT leads at $116,182, followed by Northwestern ($108,516), Penn ($105,728), USC ($104,579), Johns Hopkins ($101,300) and Duke ($100,584). The lowest figures in the top 25 belong to Stevens ($82,175), UC Irvine ($82,806) and Michigan ($84,138). Across the top 100, published medians run from $39,927 at the University of Washington to MIT’s figure.
Three limits apply. Scorecard publishes no figure for Caltech, Stanford or Cornell, and 28 of the top 100 have none, so their Earnings & ROI scores (70.2 to 72.3 for those three) rest partly on the universe median. The medians include only graduates who are working and not enrolled four years after completion, so they are early-career figures, not estimates of long-term earnings. And the data cannot separate what a program adds from the students it enrolls.
A Decision Path for Counselors
The composite blends goals that point different students in different directions. Work through these questions in order; the first one that fits the student tells you which part of the ranking to read.
1. Is the student aiming for a research doctorate?
Read PhD Productivity and the rates in Figure 2. Caltech, MIT, Johns Hopkins and Duke lead on rate, and Rice, ranked 31st overall, sits fifth.
2. Does the student want a department where BME is central to the campus?
Read Major Emphasis and Figure 1. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Johns Hopkins, Case Western, Georgia Tech and Stevens lead.
3. Is early-career salary the priority?
Read Figure 3, and check whether the school has a published figure before comparing it with others.
4. Is the student planning on medical school?
This ranking does not measure medical school admission, and it does not measure access to a hospital or medical center. Ask each school for its own outcomes data, and use the composite only as a general comparison across the dimensions this ranking measures.
Data sources: College Transitions 2026 Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Ranking, compiled March 2026. IPEDS Completions, CIP 14.05 (Biomedical/Medical Engineering), bachelor’s degrees, fiscal years 2022 through 2024. U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, field-of-study median earnings four years after completion for CIP 14.05 at the bachelor’s level (published for 58.3 percent of programs; the remainder set to the universe median), and institution-level median earnings 10 years after entry. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, institution-level return on investment at 20 and 40 years. National Science Foundation, Survey of Earned Doctorates, bioengineering and biomedical engineering, 2015 through 2024, by baccalaureate-origin institution. Academic Rating indicators from IPEDS and the College Transitions Common Data Set panel. Universe: 155 institutions awarding at least 12 BME bachelor’s degrees over 2022 through 2024. All percentiles are computed across the full universe. Public or private control reflects the institution as a whole.
