For decades, students and university recruiters alike have turned to the US News & World Report rankings to identify the “top” colleges and universities for a given field. For undergraduate software engineering, the schools that make their 2022 list are unsurprising: MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley top the list (again).
Here at CodeSignal, we asked: what are the top schools for engineering if you look at students’ actual coding skills—rather than the US News report’s obscure methodology?
The second annual CodeSignal University Ranking Report does just that. This report analyzes the results of the General Coding Framework, a widely-adopted validated skills assessment for evaluating core programming and computer science knowledge taken by more than 50 percent of graduating computer science majors in the US.
Based on this data, the report ranks universities based on the percentage of students who took the GCA that scored over an 800 (equivalent to the 84th percentile).
Here are some of the key findings of our 2022 report:
- 12 of the top 30 schools in our skill-based ranking did not make the US News & World Report’s top 30 undergraduate engineering programs.

- Even the #1 school in our skill-based ranking, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, didn’t make the US News top 30.

- UC Berkeley and Stanford, tied for #2 in the US News ranking, don’t make our top 10.

- 24 of the top 50 schools in our skill-based ranking are Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) or Emerging HSIs.
To see our top 50 ranked universities in the US for 2022, you can download the full report for free.