Which kind of college sends the most students on to a research doctorate in neuroscience?
Count the doctorates and the answer is a big public university. Alumni of the University of Michigan earned 107 neuroscience doctorates between 2015 and 2024, more than any other school in our top 100, with UCLA and UC San Diego close behind at 106 each. Divide by enrollment and the answer flips. Pomona College alumni earned 37, which works out to 21.0 per 1,000 undergraduates. Michigan’s rate is 3.2.
Both numbers feed the PhD component of the 2026 College Transitions ranking of undergraduate neuroscience programs, and the pull between them runs through the whole list. Private research universities hold the first 12 places. Seven liberal arts colleges reach the top 25. Michigan, at 25th, is the only public university in it. Below are the top 25, a look at how each kind of school earns its score, and a guide to which parts of the ranking to read for which student.
How the Ranking Scores Neuroscience
The ranking covers the federal CIP 26.15 family, Neurobiology and Neurosciences. A program qualifies with at least 12 bachelor’s degrees over fiscal years 2022 through 2024. Of 237 qualifying institutions, 218 had enough data to score. Each program receives a percentile on five components, which are then weighted into a composite.
| Component | Weight | What it measures | Source and years |
| Major Emphasis | 12% | Neuroscience degrees as a share of all bachelor’s degrees the institution awarded | IPEDS Completions, 2022 to 2024 |
| Program Scale | 13% | Number of neuroscience 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% | Institution-wide median earnings (55%), net ROI at 20 years (22.5%) and 40 years (22.5%) | College Scorecard; Georgetown CEW |
| PhD Productivity | 20% | Neuroscience research doctorates earned by the institution’s 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 features of this design shape the results, and a counselor should know both before putting the list in front of a family.
First, Earnings & ROI measures the institution, not the neuroscience major. College Scorecard published neuroscience-specific earnings for only 74 of the 237 qualifying programs, fewer than a third, because it withholds figures for small cohorts. With coverage that thin, the component uses school-wide median earnings and Georgetown’s return-on-investment estimates for every program. The earnings of a school’s graduates in all majors set this score.
Second, PhD Productivity draws on the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates, which counts research doctorates, most of them PhDs, and excludes professional degrees such as the MD. Neuroscience majors who go to medical school do not appear in it, so the component describes a research pipeline, not a pre-medical one. Doctorates are credited to the institution where the recipient earned a bachelor’s degree. And a program with no record in the NSF data scores zero on the component rather than being left out. Seven top-100 programs are in that position, including Emory University (ranked 50th) and Washington University in St. Louis (62nd).
The Top 25
Penn leads at 91.7, with Harvard at 91.5 and Johns Hopkins at 90.3. Ranks are set on unrounded scores, which separates several programs that display as ties. Columbia, Notre Dame and Chicago all show 86.0, as do Dartmouth and Rice at 80.2, Colgate and Barnard at 79.5, and Boston College and Washington and Lee at 78.4.
| Rank | Institution | State | Type | Neuroscience degrees, 2022-24 | Score |
| 1 | University of Pennsylvania | PA | Private university | 377 | 91.7 |
| 2 | Harvard University | MA | Private university | 268 | 91.5 |
| 3 | Johns Hopkins University | MD | Private university | 361 | 90.3 |
| 4 | Duke University | NC | Private university | 269 | 90.0 |
| 5 | Northwestern University | IL | Private university | 308 | 87.8 |
| 6 | Brown University | RI | Private university | 201 | 87.3 |
| 7 | Princeton University | NJ | Private university | 111 | 86.9 |
| 8 | Columbia University | NY | Private university | 271 | 86.0 |
| 9 | University of Notre Dame | IN | Private university | 398 | 86.0 |
| 10 | University of Chicago | IL | Private university | 182 | 86.0 |
| 11 | Yale University | CT | Private university | 122 | 83.6 |
| 12 | Vanderbilt University | TN | Private university | 174 | 81.6 |
| 13 | Lafayette College | PA | Liberal arts college | 120 | 80.8 |
| 14 | Dartmouth College | NH | Private university | 96 | 80.2 |
| 15 | Rice University | TX | Private university | 101 | 80.2 |
| 16 | Pomona College | CA | Liberal arts college | 74 | 80.1 |
| 17 | Colgate University | NY | Liberal arts college | 92 | 79.5 |
| 18 | Barnard College | NY | Liberal arts college | 165 | 79.5 |
| 19 | Bowdoin College | ME | Liberal arts college | 81 | 79.2 |
| 20 | Boston College | MA | Private university | 278 | 78.4 |
| 21 | Washington and Lee University | VA | Liberal arts college | 59 | 78.4 |
| 22 | Wellesley College | MA | Liberal arts college | 97 | 77.6 |
| 23 | Boston University | MA | Private university | 379 | 76.7 |
| 24 | Carnegie Mellon University | PA | Private university | 77 | 76.6 |
| 25 | University of Michigan | MI | Public university | 554 | 76.5 |
Table 2. Top 25 undergraduate neuroscience programs, 2026. Neuroscience degrees are bachelor’s degrees under CIP 26.15, fiscal years 2022 through 2024. Source: College Transitions 2026 Neuroscience Ranking; IPEDS Completions.
Figure 1 lays out each program’s five percentile scores, so a reader can see at a glance where a school’s composite comes from.
Figure 1. Component percentiles for the top 25 programs. Darker cells are higher scores. Source: College Transitions 2026 Neuroscience Ranking.
Private Research Universities Hold the First 12 Places
Every program ranked first through 12th is a private research university. Their advantage is broad rather than concentrated in one component. Penn is the only program in the top 25 with no component below 85. Its lowest is Major Emphasis, at 85.3.
The largest single gap between these schools and everyone else is Earnings & ROI. Across the top 100, private universities average the 87th percentile on it, while small private colleges average the 63rd and public universities the 67th (Figure 2, below). Because the component reflects institution-wide earnings, it carries a school’s overall earnings profile into its neuroscience score.
Academic Rating is the other separator at the top. Princeton leads all 218 programs at 92.5, followed by Duke (91.5), Northwestern (91.2), Chicago (90.9) and Harvard (90.7).
Johns Hopkins is the only program to reach 100 on Major Emphasis. Neuroscience accounted for 8.6 percent of all the bachelor’s degrees it awarded over the three years. Its PhD Productivity score of 97.9 trails only MIT’s 98.4, on the strength of 99 neuroscience doctorates among its alumni, or 16.3 per 1,000 undergraduates.
Seven Liberal Arts Colleges Reach the Top 25
Lafayette (13th), Pomona (16th), Colgate (17th), Barnard (18th), Bowdoin (19th), Washington and Lee (21st) and Wellesley (22nd) all place in the top 25. Figure 2 shows how colleges like these earn their scores, and how that differs from the two kinds of universities.
Figure 2. Average component percentile by institution type, top 100 programs. Small private colleges are private institutions with fewer than 4,000 undergraduates. Source: College Transitions 2026 Neuroscience Ranking.
Small private colleges average the 79th percentile on Major Emphasis, against 61 for private universities and 47 for public universities. They average only the 47th on Program Scale. Neuroscience is a large share of what these colleges award even when the number of majors is modest. Barnard’s 165 neuroscience degrees in three years earn a Major Emphasis of 98.6, Lafayette’s 120 earn 95.9, Pomona’s 74 earn 93.6 and Bowdoin’s 81 earn 93.1.
Their PhD scores lean on the per-capita half of the formula. Pomona’s 37 doctorates come to 21.0 per 1,000 undergraduates, and Bowdoin’s 22 to 11.9. Outside the top 25, Allegheny (17.8), Oberlin (17.0) and Haverford (14.8) all post rates above Harvard’s 11.4.
For a student set on neuroscience research, these colleges belong on the same list as the research universities above them. The data do not say why their graduates go on to doctorates at these rates, and they do not predict any one student’s path. They do show that a small enrollment has not kept these colleges out of the research pipeline.
The Big Public Programs Award the Most Degrees and Rank Lower
The largest public programs award neuroscience degrees at far higher volumes than any private program. The largest private program in the top 100, Emory’s, awarded 480 over the three years. UC Davis awarded 1,300, followed by UT Austin (827), Ohio State (814) and Binghamton (735). All four score 98.6 or higher on Program Scale, and none reaches the top 25. UC Davis ranks 34th, UT Austin 46th, Binghamton 74th and Ohio State 83rd.
Figure 2 shows the trade. Public universities average the 90th percentile on Program Scale but the 57th on Academic Rating and the 47th on Major Emphasis, since neuroscience is a small share of a large university’s degrees even when the major itself is big. Michigan, the top public program, pairs a Program Scale of 96.3 with an Academic Rating of 68.0.
Michigan, UC San Diego (35th) and UCLA (36th) lead the top 100 in raw neuroscience doctorates, and Wisconsin (41st) follows with 100. Spread over 33,000 to 39,000 undergraduates, those counts come to 2.6 to 3.2 per 1,000, which limits what the per-capita half of the PhD score can add.
Two Routes to a High PhD Score
Figure 3 plots the two halves of the PhD component against each other for the top 100. They barely move together. Across the 93 programs plotted, the correlation between the count and the rate is 0.13.
Figure 3. Neuroscience research doctorates among alumni, 2015 to 2024, against the rate per 1,000 undergraduates, top 100 programs (seven with no NSF record omitted). Source: NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates, as compiled in the College Transitions 2026 Neuroscience Ranking.
The programs with the highest PhD scores do well on both measures. MIT leads at 98.4, with 96 doctorates and a rate of 21.0. Johns Hopkins follows at 97.9, then Brown at 96.6 (93 doctorates, 12.0 per 1,000) and Harvard at 95.4 (81 doctorates, 11.4 per 1,000).
MIT also shows how far the PhD component and the rest of the ranking can diverge. It awarded 28 neuroscience bachelor’s degrees over three years and ranks 32nd overall, held down by a Major Emphasis of 18.8 and a Program Scale of 22.5. It posts the top Earnings & ROI score in the ranking (100.0) as well as the top PhD score. Caltech, ranked 27th, follows the same pattern with 18 neuroscience degrees and the highest doctoral rate in the top 100, 23.3 per 1,000.
Reading the Ranking for a Particular Student
The composite blends goals that point different students in different directions. Before showing a family the list, match the student’s plan to the parts of the data that bear on it.
| Student’s plan | Read | What the ranking cannot tell you |
| Research career or PhD | PhD Productivity, and the per-1,000 rate in Figure 3 | Which labs take undergraduates, or any one student’s odds of doctoral admission |
| Medical school | Academic Rating (retention, graduation, class size, faculty) | Medical school admission outcomes, which are not measured |
| A large department with many fellow majors | Program Scale and the degree counts in Table 2 | Course offerings and class sizes inside the major |
| Earnings after graduation | Nothing in the ranking is specific to neuroscience majors | Neuroscience graduates’ earnings, which Scorecard publishes for fewer than a third of programs |
Table 3. Which parts of the ranking apply to which plan.
A student headed for a research career has strong options at every level of this list, including colleges ranked in the teens and public universities in the 30s. A student headed for medical school should know that the ranking does not measure the outcome that student cares about most, and should weigh the composite accordingly.
Data sources: College Transitions 2026 Undergraduate Neuroscience Ranking, compiled March 2026. IPEDS Completions, CIP 26.15 (neurobiology and neurosciences), bachelor’s degrees, fiscal years 2022 through 2024. U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, institution-level median earnings 10 years after entry; neuroscience field-of-study earnings were not used in scoring because they were published for fewer than a third of programs. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, net return on investment at 20 and 40 years. National Science Foundation, Survey of Earned Doctorates, neurobiology and neurosciences, 2015 through 2024. Academic Rating indicators from IPEDS and the College Transitions Common Data Set panel. Universe: 237 institutions awarding at least 12 neuroscience bachelor’s degrees over 2022 through 2024; 218 scored. All percentiles are computed within the 218 scored programs. Institution type reflects the institution as a whole.
