12 Purdue graduate programs ranked in top 10 in U.S. News & World Report 2026 lists

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University’s pursuit of research excellence at scale continues, with 12 academic programs in engineering, agriculture and health ranking in the top 10 overall in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 edition of Best Graduate Schools.

Purdue’s College of Engineering jumped to No. 4 overall among nearly 200 engineering schools ranked in the U.S., behind only MIT, Stanford and University of California, Berkeley, and No. 2 among the nation’s public institutions. Three engineering disciplines retained their standing in the top 5 nationally while eight programs were among the top 10 in the U.S., according to the report released Tuesday (April 7).

“Our efforts to strengthen Purdue’s research impact and scholarly excellence continue to bear fruit, thanks to the continued hard work and focus of our faculty, staff and researchers,” said Purdue Provost Patrick Wolfe. “Particularly in the core STEM strengths for which Purdue is so well known, we see consistent success in nurturing top-talent graduates and scholars across engineering, agriculture, health, computing and business. This in turn helps us to recruit even more top-flight faculty and graduate students across these broad areas of strength.”

Purdue’s agricultural and biological engineering graduate program, jointly led by the colleges of Agriculture and Engineering, remained No. 1 for a sixth consecutive year. The university’s speech, language and hearing sciences program in the College of Health and Human Sciences (HHS) remained among the nation’s best at No. 3 overall, and the audiology program in HHS was No. 6.

Purdue’s pharmacy program also remained in the top 10, tied at No. 8 overall and jumping one spot from its 2024 placing when that specialty program was last ranked.

Industrial engineering, meanwhile, was No. 4, and aeronautics and astronautics retained its No. 5 ranking. Purdue’s biomedical engineering program also remained at its decade-high No. 5 among institutions without a medical school or jointly administered BME program.

The highlights of Purdue’s graduate engineering programs and their rankings:

• Agricultural and biological engineering: No. 1
• Industrial engineering: No. 4  
• Aeronautics and astronautics: No. 5  
• Civil engineering: No. 7
• Mechanical engineering: No. 8
• Electrical engineering: No. 8 (up one spot)  
• Computer engineering: No. 9 
• Nuclear engineering: No. 10 
• Environmental engineering: No. 11
• Materials engineering: No. 11 (up one spot)
• Chemical engineering: No. 14
• Biomedical engineering: No. 5 among institutions without a medical school or jointly administered BME program, No. 25 overall 

Purdue’s strategic initiatives once again made a particularly strong showing.

Driving the Purdue Computes strategic initiative, computer engineering was ranked among the nation’s top 10, and Purdue’s Department of Computer Science, shared jointly between the colleges of Science and Engineering, also stood out in specialty areas among more than 200 institutions: 

• Computer systems: No. 13
• Programming language: No. 14
• Computer science: No. 15
• Artificial intelligence: No. 20 (up three spots)

The reimagined Mitch Daniels School of Business, which has seen strong enrollment demand for its undergraduate and online graduate programs, also continued its upward trajectory, with its specialty disciplines posting strong rankings in the survey of over 500 U.S. institutions with master’s level business programs. The highlights:

• Business analytics: No. 18 
• Production operations: No. 18
• Supply chain management/logistics: No. 22

Aligned with Purdue’s comprehensive One Health initiative, two HHS programs continued their strong showings, remaining in the top 10 overall in the graduate rankings:

• Speech, language and hearing sciences: No. 3
• Audiology: No. 6
• Master’s in nursing: No. 22 (up one spot)

Construction is underway on the $160 million Nursing and Pharmacy Education Building, a transformative 186,000-square-foot facility at the West Lafayette location that will continue to accelerate key One Health programs. 

Arvind Raman, the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering, said factors propelling Engineering’s latest rankings success include increasingly selective doctoral admissions, increased peer reputation and higher per capita research expenditures.

“Purdue Engineering’s 2026 research and graduate engineering rankings take us to the next level of excellence in achieving Vision 2030, particularly in elevating research impact,” Raman said. “I am tremendously proud of our faculty, staff, students, alumni and industry partners who have achieved these milestones in a highly competitive and rapidly changing research landscape.”

The U.S. News & World Report’s Best Graduate Schools rankings for 2026 are based on two types of data: expert opinion about program excellence and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school’s faculty, research and students, and students’ postgraduate outcomes. Data for the overall rankings in the six primary disciplines — business, education, engineering, law, medicine and nursing — came from statistical surveys and peer assessment surveys sent to academics and professionals in respective fields, conducted in fall 2025 and early 2026. In some cases, data from these surveys was combined with third-party information. Other rankings for specialty areas are derived from expert opinion surveys only.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 106,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 57,000 at our main campus locations in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 14 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its integrated, comprehensive Indianapolis urban expansion; the Mitch Daniels School of Business; Purdue Computes; and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.