CodeSignal’s skills-based university ranking
We ranked colleges and universities based on their students’ objective coding skills—and the results may surprise you.
Key findings of our 2024 report:
Report sections
Top 30 universities
Highlighted universities don’t appear on the US News & World Report’s top 30 Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs.
Carnegie Mellon University (82nd percentile)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (81st percentile)
Rice University (76th percentile)
University of Pennsylvania (74th percentile)
University of California, Los Angeles (74th percentile)
California Institute of Technology (74th percentile)
University of Chicago (74th percentile)
Yale University (74th percentile)
University of California, San Diego (74th percentile)
Stony Brook University (74th percentile)
University of California, Berkeley (74th percentile)
University of Texas at Austin (74th percentile)
University of California, Irvine (74th percentile)
Duke University (74th percentile)
Brown University (74th percentile)
University of Southern California (74th percentile)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (73rd percentile)
Stanford University (73rd percentile)
Columbia University (73rd percentile)
Dartmouth College (73rd percentile)
University of Massachusetts at Amherst (73rd percentile)
Cornell University (73rd percentile)
Georgia Institute of Technology (73rd percentile)
University of California, Santa Barbara (73rd percentile)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (72nd percentile)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (72nd percentile)
Johns Hopkins University (72nd percentile)
Princeton University (72nd percentile)
Arizona State University (71st percentile)
New York University (71st percentile)
Emerging leaders
These universities, ranked 31 to 50 in CodeSignal’s skill-based university ranking, are rarely targeted by university recruiters.
Highlighted universities don’t appear on the US News & World Report’s top 50 Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs.
Texas A&M University, College Station (70th percentile)
San José State University (70th percentile)
University of Arizona (70th percentile)
Rutgers University (70th percentile)
North Carolina State University (69th percentile)
University of Wisconsin, Madison (69th percentile)
Purdue University (69th percentile)
Indiana University (69th percentile)
Washington University, Saint Louis (69th percentile)
University of Maryland, College Park (69th percentile)
Santa Clara University (69th percentile)
University of Florida (68th percentile)
Vanderbilt University (68th percentile)
Northeastern University (67th percentile)
Tufts University (67th percentile)
State University of New York at Buffalo (67th percentile)
Rochester Institute of Technology (66th percentile)
University of Texas at Dallas (66th percentile)
University of Virginia, Charlottesville (65th percentile)
University of California, Riverside (65th percentile)
Noteworthy schools for diverse talent
21 of the schools that made our top 50 list are designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) or Emerging HSIs. This means that a significant portion of the student body identifies as Hispanic or Latino/a.
Top global schools for developer talent
This year, we also looked at schools outside of the United States by the same objective measure of students’ skills. We found that when we open up our rankings to all schools across the globe, 5 schools outside of the US would make our top 50 list. Those schools are:
University of Cambridge
United Kingdom (80th percentile)
University of Waterloo
Canada (75th percentile)
Imperial College London
United Kingdom (72nd percentile)
University of Alberta
Canada (68th percentile)
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
India (67th percentile)
Using coding skills assessment results helps you identify qualified candidates
CodeSignal tip: target overlooked schools
These universities made our top 50, but they’re significantly less likely to be targeted by recruiters than Stanford, MIT, or UC Berkeley. Here are our top 5 overlooked schools:
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University of California, San Diego
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Stony Brook University
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The University of Texas at Austin
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University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Arizona State University
Conclusion
The results are clear: When you rank schools by an objective measure of their students’ technical skills, you’ll find that talent comes from everywhere—not just the schools traditionally recognized as top engineering schools. Directly measuring candidates’ skills, rather than looking at what school they attended, is a proven way to build a stronger and more diverse team.
Key takeaways:
Companies recruiting early career developers should expand the scope of their target universities.
Much of the top new grad engineering talent is coming out of schools not typically recognized for their engineering programs.
Top talent is also diverse talent; many of the top schools in our skill-based ranking are Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
About the author: CodeSignal’s Talent Science Team
The Talent Science team is comprised of experts in Industrial-Organizational (IO) psychology, which is the scientific study of human behavior in the workplace. A core topic within IO is the science of personnel selection or talent assessment.
Together with CodeSignal’s engineering teams, the Talent Science team sets the standard for fair and predictive technical hiring by developing, validating, maintaining, and ensuring compliance for CodeSignal’s Certified Evaluations. Leading companies use these research-backed evaluations to generate a stronger signal of skill, reduce legal risk in the hiring process, and give time back to engineers.
Methodology
We analyzed the results of the General Coding Framework, which measures core programming and computer science fundamentals.
- For this analysis, we’ve inferred the name of educational institutions from the email domains associated with each candidate who completed the General Coding Framework.
- To support valid comparisons, we’ve adopted U.S. News & World Report’s grouping of colleges and included schools that met the criteria for the “National University” group.
- For our ranking analyses, we only included universities that had more than 30 student candidates.
- The 2024 ranking dataset includes all student candidates with university emails who completed the General Coding Framework between April 22, 2023 and April 22, 2024 (n > 21,000).
What is the General Coding Framework?
The General Coding Framework is the industry standard for evaluation of core programming and computer science fundamentals taught in most undergraduate programs in the US.
- Consists of 4 language-agnostic code writing tasks
- Developed and validated by our Talent Science Team
- Used by top-tier companies like Meta, Uber, and Zoom as their primary technical assessment for early talent hiring