We ranked colleges and universities based on their students’ objective coding skills—and the results may surprise you.
Key findings of our 2025 report:
*Defined as top 25% of university test-takers
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 (84th percentile)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (78th percentile)
Stony Brook University (75th percentile)
University of California, Los Angeles (75th percentile)
University of Pennsylvania (73rd percentile)
California Institute of Technology (72nd percentile)
University of California, San Diego (72nd percentile)
Duke University (71st percentile)
San José State University (71st percentile)
University of Southern California (71st percentile)
Rice University (71st percentile)
Yale University (71st percentile)
Georgia Institute of Technology (69th percentile)
Johns Hopkins University (68th percentile)
Indiana University (68th percentile)
The University of Texas at Austin (67th percentile)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (67th percentile)
University of Chicago (66th percentile)
University of California, Berkeley (66th percentile)
Cornell University (66th percentile)
Arizona State University (66th percentile)
Brown University (66th percentile)
Columbia University (66th percentile)
Texas A&M University, College Station (66th percentile)
Stanford University (66th percentile)
Purdue University (66th percentile)
University of Florida (66th percentile)
Dartmouth College (66th percentile)
New York University (66th percentile)
Princeton University (66th 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.
Syracuse University (66th percentile)
University of California, Davis (66th percentile)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (66th percentile)
University of California, Santa Barbara (66th percentile)
North Carolina State University (66th percentile)
University of California, Irvine (66th percentile)
Northeastern University (65th percentile)
Rutgers University (65th percentile)
University of Pittsburgh (65th percentile)
University of Massachusetts at Amherst (65th percentile)
New Jersey Institute of Technology (65th percentile)
Santa Clara University (65th percentile)
Vanderbilt University (64th percentile)
University of Maryland, College Park (64th percentile)
University of Colorado at Boulder (64th percentile)
University of Illinois, Chicago (64th percentile)
State University of New York at Buffalo (64th percentile)
University of Notre Dame (63rd percentile)
University of Texas at Dallas (63rd percentile)
University of Wisconsin, Madison (63rd percentile)
Top global schools for developer talent
We also looked at schools outside of the US by the same objective measure of students’ skills. We found that when we open up our rankings to all schools across the globe, 3 schools outside of the US would make our top 50 list. Those schools are:
Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology
South Korea (71st percentile)
University of Waterloo
Canada (67th percentile)
Imperial College London
United Kingdom (64th 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:
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Stony Brook University - Stony Brook, NY
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San José State University - San José, CA
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Indiana University - Bloomington, IN
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Arizona State University - Tempe, AZ
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University of Florida - Gainesville, FL
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:
Nearly one-third of top new grad engineering talent is coming out of schools not typically recognized for their engineering programs.
Top new grad talent is geographically dispersed—it’s not concentrated in Silicon Valley or on the East Coast.
Companies recruiting early career developers should expand the scope of their target universities to find top talent.
About the author: CodeSignal’s Talent Science Team
The Talent Science team is made up of experts in Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology, which is the scientific study of human behavior in the workplace. A core topic within I-O 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 Assessments. 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 Assessment (GCA), which measures core programming and computer science fundamentals.
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- For this analysis, we’ve inferred the name of educational institutions from the email domains associated with each candidate who completed the GCA.
- 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.
- The 2025 ranking dataset includes all student candidates with university emails who completed a proctored session of the GCA between April 23, 2024 and April 9, 2024.
What is the General Coding Assessment?
The General Coding Assessment (GCA) 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
- Completed by 3 out of 4 Computer Science students in the US
- Used by top-tier companies like Meta, Uber, and Zoom as their primary technical assessment for early talent hiring
