The University of California, Berkeley ranks fourth. The Georgia Institute of Technology, Princeton University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign share fifth place.

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Cornell University and the University of Washington tie for eighth, rounding out the top 10.

Harvard and Yale, third and fourth on the main list, are not in the computer science top 10.

Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Illinois and Washington are the only public universities in the computer science top 10.

The ranking comes entirely from a peer survey. Academics and officials at computer science programs rated undergraduate programs they knew on a scale of 1 to 5, and a school's rank reflects only its average score.

Programs qualify if they are accredited by ABET, a nonprofit that accredits engineering and computing programs worldwide, or have recently awarded at least 20 computer science bachelor's degrees.

Six of the 10 schools fall outside the top 10 of U.S. News's main ranking, which covers universities offering bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees.

Washington is tied for 49th on that list, Illinois for 34th, Georgia Tech for 29th and Berkeley for 20th. Carnegie Mellon and Cornell are tied for 14th.

Only Princeton, second on the main list, and Caltech, tied for fifth on it, rank higher overall than in computer science.

A view of Yale University. Photo courtesy of WorkStudyCity

The main ranking uses up to 17 measures. Student outcomes, including graduation and retention rates, social mobility and postgraduate earnings, make up more than half of a school's score.

This year, MIT took the top spot on that list from Princeton, which had held it for 15 years, The Washington Post reported. U.S. News also replaced graduate debt with a new "earnings by major" metric, worth 5% of the score.

Families are "increasingly scrutinizing the true cost and return on investment of a college degree," LaMont Jones, managing editor for education at U.S. News, said in a statement reported by CBS News. None of these outcome measures counts toward the computer science ranking.

U.S. News also ranks computer science specialties. MIT said it placed first in theory and tied with Carnegie Mellon for first in computer systems and a combined biocomputing, bioinformatics and biotechnology category.

The university also said it came second in artificial intelligence, programming languages and data science. Carnegie Mellon topped cybersecurity, followed by Georgia Tech and Berkeley.

Georgia Tech said its computer science program kept its fifth-place spot from last year.

MIT also tops the QS World University Rankings 2027, which named it the world's top university for the 15th year in a row. It led QS's 2026 subject ranking for computer science and information systems, released in March.