2027 U.S. News Computer Science Rankings: What Applicants Should Know

Along with its ranking of national universities, U.S. News and World Report traditionally releases numerous other rankings, including rankings for specific academic programs. 

For Bay Area families, one of the most watched lists is the U.S. News Computer Science rankings.

What Changed in the 2027 U.S. News Rankings for Computer Science

In the top 20 schools, the biggest change is right at the top. MIT is now joined by CMU and Stanford in the #1 spot. (Because U.S. News lists ties alphabetically by college, CMU appears first in the list, but it is really just tied with the other two academic powerhouses.) 

But this change has little overall significance, as Stanford and CMU each shared the #2 spot last year. In fact, in the top 20 schools, there were no changes of more than two positions.

The bigger changes happened farther down the list. The spots between #24 and #44 feature some significant shuffling of positions. Here are the movers of five places or more. (As noted above, the rankings feature ties.)

CS Programs Moving Up 

But we should not overvalue the significance of one-year changes. Each of these schools, with the exception of Rice, is actually within three places of where it was in the 2022 rankings. Rice has moved up four positions since that year, which I still consider a relatively minor change. 

Some schools have moved down relative to their positions in 2026.

CS Programs Moving Down

The first two changes are insignificant. Wisconsin-Madison was #22 as recently as 2024, and it typically moves between #16 and #22. USC was #23 in 2022, suggesting that its position has remained relatively stable. The significant change here is NYU, which was #31 back in 2022. Even in this case, though, given the significant fluctuations that can occur in rankings year to year, it seems wise not to overstate the significance of this year’s 14 point drop. 

Let’s focus on the 2027 rankings for schools in California, which offers programs across a range of tiers. 

CS Rankings: Top-50 California Private Schools

From the perspective of applications, these four institutions divide into two different groups. Stanford and USC are universities that support research across the liberal arts and that tend to value applicants who are well rounded in both STEM and humanities. By contrast, Caltech and Harvey Mudd are willing to take applicants more narrowly focused on STEM. (Both schools do require evidence of strong writing ability, though, so applicants still need strong SAT Reading & Writing scores, as well as strong recs from humanities teachers.) 

Now let’s consider the UC system. Here, too, California offers a range of programs. 

CS Rankings: UC System

I would divide these programs into four tiers: Berkeley alone in Tier 1, UCLA and UCSD in Tier 2, Irvine, Davis, and Santa Barbara in Tier 3, and Riverside and Santa Cruz in Tier 4. Within each tier, the ranking differences are insignificant. By the way, Merced does have a CS major, but the school does not appear in the 2027 U.S. News CS rankings. 

Now let’s consider other public colleges in California—the CSU system. 

CS Rankings: CSU System

Here, too, we can identify apparent tiers. Cal Poly – SLO is alone in Tier 1, San Diego State, San Jose State, and CSU – LA occupy Tier 2, and I would combine Cal Poly – Pomona and CSU – Long Beach in Tier 3, since I feel the U.S. News rankings are probably less accurate for institutions that are less well known, for reasons that I explain below. 

These schools are ranked lower than their bigger siblings in the UC system. But in the analysis that follows, I will argue that the U.S. News CS rankings undervalue at least one of these schools, meaning that this group may offer excellent paths for CS career advancement relative to their difficulty of admission. 

Why the U.S. News CS Rankings Matter

The U.S. News CS rankings are important because they appear to give a better measure of computer science education than its more general National University Rankings. (This statement comes with important caveats, which I cover below.)

Yale, for instance, world-renowned for its programs in the humanities, is ranked #4 in National Universities but only #17 in Computer Science. A strong CS student would naturally prefer CMU, tied for #1 in CS, over Yale, even though CMU ranks lower than Yale on the National Universities list. 

These rankings also appear to reveal opportunities for applicants: Purdue is ranked #14 in CS, ahead of Yale at #17, while Purdue’s overall admission rate is dramatically higher. But CS-specific admission rates complicate that comparison. I’ll examine that issue in a separate article.

But before you draw significant conclusions from these rankings, you should probably consider their accuracy. Do the U.S. News CS rankings reliably indicate the quality of CS programs? 

Answer: It depends on which data you value. 

When reviewing these ratings, you must always bear in mind that, unlike the National Universities rankings, the U.S. News CS rankings use no objective data. Instead, the publication sends “peer assessment surveys” to “deans and senior faculty” for each qualifying CS program. The survey asks participants to rate the academic quality of programs “that they were familiar with” on a 5-point scale. 

Let’s explore this process in more detail, focusing on what U.S. News shares about its methodology.

In 2027, there were 587 qualifying programs, and U.S. News sent out 1,025 surveys, suggesting that at many schools, more than one faculty member received a survey. From the 1,025 surveys, U.S. News received 243 responses, for a response rate of about 24%. (U.S. News does not tell us how many institutions were represented in those responses. If multiple deans received and returned surveys, perhaps fewer than 243 institutions were represented.) 

But that does not mean that each institution received 243 ratings; the respondents were asked to review only the schools that they knew. So this raises a question: How well do faculty at one school understand the program at another school? 

You could argue that because academia is a relatively small club, in many cases, faculty will know other institutions reasonably well. The CS faculty at T100 schools probably encounter each other frequently at conferences, and many will have traded stories about how well their departments are doing. Some of these faculty will even have spent time at multiple institutions; they could probably fairly evaluate the quality of any program at which they taught. 

You could also argue, though, there are real limits on what the members of one CS department know about the quality of education at another CS department. A reviewer who rates based on faculty publications, for instance, might have very little insight into the quality of teaching at the same program. And, lacking a close connection to a program’s students, a reviewer might have very little knowledge of how well its students do on the job market. A reviewer could give a low rating to a school that actually performs well in these important areas of education. 

This potential lack of reviewer knowledge is linked to another weakness with the U.S. News methodology: For a given CS program, we don’t know how many ratings it received. The editors tell us that schools had to receive “at least ten ratings” (after removing the highest and the lowest ratings) to make it onto the list. That means that for some schools—and we don’t know for how many—the ranking is determined by the opinions of as few as ten faculty members from across the country. At that scale, the effect of low-information ratings is magnified, potentially skewing the CS program ranking lower (or higher) than it deserves.

This point raises another question: How much time did each respondent spend deciding on each of its ratings? Senior faculty would rather be doing research than responding to surveys; deans have many administrative tasks that probably seem more important. Neither receives money for filling out this survey. Given those incentives, they might spend as little time on the survey as possible. 

Imagine, then, that most raters seek to complete the survey as efficiently as possible. That means that a CS program that invests thousands of instructional hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars in each student receives a ranking based on a relatively small set of rapid evaluations. 

Is this a fair assessment of program quality?  

Moreover, did the knowledgeable deans and senior faculty fill out the surveys at all? There are published reports, from faculty in other departments, of survey respondents not filling out the forms themselves, raising the question of whether they are offloading the survey to subordinates. And though there is no word from CS faculty in particular, deans in other programs have openly said that they stopped responding to the U.S. News survey because they felt they lacked the knowledge to fairly evaluate programs. 

This lack of detailed program knowledge, in fact, might be why some CS programs score low on the U.S. News rankings but relatively high on the 2026 CodeSignal assessment of CS skills. San Jose State University, for instance, ranks #110 for CS but recently scored #2 out of participating universities for the CodeSignal test. Santa Clara ranks #141 but scored #40 on the test. These results suggest that students at these programs can perform well on tests of CS skills, even though their programs are ranked below #100 by U.S. News. 

Without saying that the U.S. News ratings are little more than a glorified Yelp review, we can say with certainty that they are determined by the subjective opinions of 243 people nationwide. CS applicants may therefore want to consider another ranking tool that relies on more objective data: csrankings.org. This tool doesn’t solve all of the problems of identifying a strong CS program—I’ll discuss its limitations in another post—but it does provide an assessment of faculty research that is missing from the U.S. News CS rankings.