Now in its 5th year, CodeSignal’s 2025 University Ranking Report continues to make news headlines by tackling a simple, but bold, question: what are the top schools for software engineering if you look at students’ actual coding skills? That’s a question news outlets like Dice, Government Technology, and NBC Bay Area are curious about, too.
The annual University Ranking Report answers this question by analyzing the results of CodeSignal’s General Coding Assessment (GCA), the industry standard skills assessment for evaluating core programming and computer science knowledge. Today, 3 in 4 of graduating computer science majors in the US take the GCA as part of their job search.
CodeSignal’s University Ranking Report ranks universities based on the average score of their students who took the GCA in the past year.
Key findings in 2025
Here are the top 10 schools in the 2025 report:
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Stony Brook University
- University of California, Los Angeles
- University of Pennsylvania
- California Institute of Technology
- University of California, San Diego
- Duke University
- San José State University
- University of Southern California
Additionally, the 2025 report found that:
- 28.4% of high-scorers come from schools not included in the US News & World Report’s top 50 undergraduate engineering programs.
- 12 of the top 50 schools in our skill-based ranking did not make the US News & World top 50.
- Two of the top 10 US schools in our rankings, Stony Brook University (#3) and San José State University (#9), didn’t make the US News & World top 50.
- Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology is the top non-US school for software engineering talent this year, ranking just below Rice University (#12 on the US list).
“This report is a celebration of the universities equipping students with the skills that matter most. When we focus on what students can actually do, not just where they studied, we uncover incredible talent from institutions of all types. It’s a reminder that great engineers are everywhere, and we need to broaden how we recognize and recruit them.”
Tigran Sloyan, CEO and Co-founder of CodeSignal
See more top schools
See our top 50 ranked universities in the US and globally for 2025 in our full report.