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UNM’s engineering graduate program ranks No. 86 by ‘U.S. News & World Report’

March 29, 2022 - by Kim Delker

photo: UNM Centennial Engineering building

The University of New Mexico School of Engineering ranked No. 86 in the nation in the U.S. News & World Report 2023 Best Graduate Schools rankings for engineering, released today.

UNM is the only engineering program in New Mexico to rank in the top 100. Last year, the School of Engineering ranked No. 84 and No. 87 in the 2021 rankings.

“These rankings are extremely competitive, so I am encouraged that the School of Engineering has managed to hold steady, even during these tough couple of years of the pandemic, and we are still the top-ranked engineering program in the state,” said Christos Christodoulou, Jim and Ellen King Dean of Engineering and Computing. “The numbers are based on a variety of factors, including how our alumni rank the quality of our graduates, so the fact that our numbers have held is proof of the impact our school continues to have in the world.”

The 2023 U.S. News survey also ranked specialty programs. UNM ranked No. 14 in nuclear engineering, No. 63 in electrical engineering, No. 69 in computer engineering, No. 74 in environmental engineering, No. 77 in chemical engineering, No. 98 in civil engineering, No. 99 in computer science, No. 111 in biomedical engineering and No. 122 in mechanical engineering.

The Best Graduate Schools rankings are based on two types of data: expert opinions about program excellence, and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school's faculty, research and students.

For the rankings of graduate engineering programs, more than 200 engineering schools that grant doctoral degrees were surveyed. Data were collected in fall 2021and early 2022. Factors that went into the rankings include:

  • Peer assessment: U.S. News asked deans, program directors, and senior faculty to judge the academic quality of programs in their field on a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (outstanding). In business, education, engineering, law and medicine, U.S. News also surveyed professionals who hire new graduates. The schools supplied the names of the surveyed professionals.
  • Recruiter assessment: Corporate recruiters and company contacts are asked to rate programs on a scale from marginal to outstanding. All the names of those surveyed for the recruiter assessment score were provided by the engineering schools themselves.
  • Student selectivity: Mean GRE scores and acceptance rate.
  • Faculty resources, including student-faculty ratio, percentage of faculty in the National Academy of Engineering and doctoral degrees awarded.
  • Research activity, including total research expenditures and average research expenditures per faculty member.

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