7 California Colleges Make Top Rankings of 2018 Best Graduate Schools

U.S. News & World Report has released its annual set of rankings, determining which are the best graduate schools in the nation for 2018 in six disciplines: business, law, engineering, education, medicine, and nursing.

Californians who wish to go to a top grad school need not leave the state, except for nursing. If your field is engineering, California dominates with five of the Top 15 slots.

California colleges and universities honored on the list this year include: Stanford University, University of California-Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, University of Southern California, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-San Diego, and University of California-San Francisco.

The rankings are calculated based on factors such as employment rates, starting salaries for graduates and standardized test scores of newly enrolled students. U.S. News explains that because each graduate program is different, the methodology varies across disciplines.

In full-time MBA rankings, the best graduate schools are:

Harvard University (1)
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business (1)
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business (3)
MIT Sloan School of Management (4)
Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (4)
Stanford University (4)
Haas School of Business at University of California-Berkeley (7)
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth (8)
Columbia University (9)
Yale University (9)
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (11)
Duke University (12)
New York University (12)
University of Virginia (14)
University of California-Los Angeles (15)
(Click here to see the full rankings)

The top law schools are:

Yale University (1)
Stanford University (2)
Harvard University (3)
University of Chicago (4)
Columbia University (5)
New York University (6)
University of Pennsylvania (7)
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (8)
University of Virginia (8)
Duke University (10)
Northwestern University (10)
University of California-Berkeley (12)
(Click here to see the full rankings)

The top schools for engineering are:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1)
Stanford University (2)
University of California-Berkeley (3)
California Institute of Technology (4)
Carnegie Mellon University (5)
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (5)
Georgia Institute of Technology (7)
Purdue University-West Lafayette (8)
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign (9)
University of Texas-Austin (9)
Texas A&M-College Station (11)
University of Southern California (11)
Columbia University (13)
Cornell University (13)
University of California-San Diego (13)
(Click here to see the full rankings)

The top schools for medicine are:

Harvard University (1)
Stanford University (2)
Johns Hopkins University (3)
University of California-San Francisco (4)
University of Pennsylvania (5)
Columbia University (6)
Duke University (7)
Washington University in St. Louis (7)
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (9)
Yale University (9)
University of California-Los Angeles (10)
New York University (12)
University of Washington (12)
(Click here to see the full rankings)

The top schools for nursing are:

Duke University (1)
Johns Hopkins University (2)
University of Pennsylvania (3)
Emory University (4)
Ohio State University (5)
University of Washington (6)
Yale University (6)
Columbia University (8)
University of Pittsburgh (8)
University of Maryland-Baltimore (10)
Case Western Reserve University (11)
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (11)
New York University (13)
University of Alabama-Birmingham (13)
(Click here to see the full rankings)

The top schools for education are:

Harvard University (1)
Stanford University (2)
University of California-Los Angeles (3)
University of Pennsylvania (3)
University of Wisconsin-Madison (3)
Johns Hopkins University (6)
Teachers College, Columbia University (7)
Vanderbilt University (7)
University of Washington (9)
Northwestern University (10)
Arizona State University (11)
University of Texas-Austin (11)
New York University (13)
University of Oregon (14)
(Click here to see the full rankings)

U.S. News rankings of programs in business, law, education, medicine, nursing and engineering are based on two types of data: expert opinion and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school’s faculty, research and students. The data comes from surveys sent to administrators in close to 2,000 graduate programs and from reputation surveys sent to more than 16,500 academics and professionals in the discipline. U.S. News also surveyed professionals who hire new graduates. Statistical indicators fall into two categories: inputs, such as admission test scores, and outputs, such as starting salaries.

The value for each indicator was standardized about its mean and weighted, based on its importance. Final scores were rescaled so the highest ranking institution was given a score of 100, and other scores were calculated as a percentage of that top score and then rounded to the nearest whole number.
Beyond the six disciplines ranked annually, U.S. News periodically ranks programs in the sciences, social sciences and humanities.

• Click here to see which schools rank among the best for graduate programs.

- Patch Editor Feroze Dhanoa contributed to this article; Image by brainchildvn on Flickr, CC 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons