Rankings Nationally,
U.S. News & World Report placed Carnegie Mellon in a tie with
Washington University in St. Louis,
University of Notre Dame, and the
University of Michigan for 20th place among American research universities in their 2025-2026 rankings. Many of its graduate programs have been ranked in national and international surveys. In 2022,
U.S. News ranked Carnegie Mellon as having 23 graduate programs in the Top 10 nationwide and 16 in the Top 5 nationwide., including three programs ranked first: Artificial Intelligence, Programming Languages, and Information and Technology Management. In particular, the
CMU School of Computer Science has been consistently ranked the best in the nation, tied with
MIT,
Stanford, and
UC Berkeley. Globally, Carnegie Mellon is ranked 24th by
Times Higher Education and 52nd by
QS World University Rankings. Carnegie Mellon was named one of the "New
Ivies" by
Newsweek. In 2010,
The Wall Street Journal ranked Carnegie Mellon 1st in computer science, 4th in finance, 10th overall, and 21st in engineering according to job recruiters. Carnegie Mellon ranks thirteenth among "Best Colleges By Salary Potential (Bachelor's Only)" in the United States according to
PayScale 2016–17 study. In 2024, Carnegie Mellon's
Tepper School of Business placed 9th in an annual ranking of U.S. business schools by
Bloomberg Businessweek. In 2016,
The Hollywood Reporter ranked the School of Drama 3rd in the world among undergraduate drama schools. In 2015, the same publication ranked the MFA program at the School of Drama 5th in the world. Carnegie Mellon's
Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences was ranked 55th for social sciences and 60th for humanities in the world by
Times Higher Education for 2020. Dietrich College is also ranked 20th for social sciences among Shanghai Jiao Tong University's world's top 100 universities. Carnegie Mellon is one of 66 elected members of the
Association of American Universities and one of 29 members (one of 13 American members) of the
World Economic Forum Global University Leaders Forum.
Admissions U.S. News & World Report rates admission to Carnegie Mellon as "most selective". For the class of 2026 (enrolling in fall 2022), Carnegie Mellon received 34,261 applications and admitted approximately 3,873 (11%), with 1,736 enrolling. The acceptance rates of the individual colleges and programs range from
Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture's 30% to
Carnegie Mellon School of Drama's 3%. The largest college, in terms of the class of 2025 enrollment, is the College of Engineering with 499 students, followed by the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences with 391, and the Mellon College of Science with 266. The smallest college is the School of Design, with 34. The university is
need-blind for domestic applicants. The class of 2026 enrolled students from 46 U.S. states and 42 countries.
Research CMU is
classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity". For the 2021 fiscal year, the university spent $402 million on research. The primary recipients of this funding were the School of Computer Science ($100.3 million), the
Software Engineering Institute ($71.7 million), the College of Engineering ($48.5 million), and the Mellon College of Science ($47.7 million). The research money comes largely from federal sources, with a federal investment of $234.9 million in 2021. The federal agencies that invest the most money include the
National Science Foundation and the
Department of Defense, which contributed $70.5 million and $90.4 million in 2021, respectively. The recognition of Carnegie Mellon as one of the best research facilities in the nation has a long history. As early as the 1987 federal budget, CMU was ranked as third in the amount of federal research funds received with $41.5 million, with only MIT and Johns Hopkins receiving more research funds from the Department of Defense. The
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is a joint effort between Carnegie Mellon,
University of Pittsburgh, and
Westinghouse Electric Company. PSC was founded in 1986 by its two scientific directors, Ralph Roskies of the University of Pittsburgh and Michael Levine of Carnegie Mellon. PSC is a leading partner in the
TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation's cyberinfrastructure program. is being developed by the RI. The Neuroscience Institute (NI) is a university-wide research institute that was founded in 2018 as a successor to an earlier effort, known as Brainhub. Combining research in
computer science,
engineering,
machine learning,
statistics, and
cognitive science with basic
neuroscience, NI aims to promote research that will improve the human condition. Devices developed by the institute have been designed to enable communication for locked-in patients, treatments for
Parkinson's disease, improved
brain imaging technology using
artificial intelligence, and
electrodes that work with coarse, curly hair. NI includes over 30 faculty and 100 trainees from four colleges and oversees two
PhD programs (the Program in Neural Computation and the Program in Systems Neuroscience) that have received support from the
National Institutes of Health. Numerous philanthropic gifts help support NI research. NI also provides direct administrative and monetary support for the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, a long-running collaboration with the
University of Pittsburgh. The
Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science and considered to be one of the leading centers of robotics research in the world. The Field Robotics Center (FRC) has developed a number of significant robots, including
Sandstorm and
H1ghlander, which finished second and third in the
DARPA Grand Challenge, and Boss, which won the
DARPA Urban Challenge. The Robotics Institute has partnered with a spinoff company,
Astrobotic Technology Inc., to land a CMU robot on the moon by 2016 in pursuit of the Google Lunar XPrize. The robot, known as Andy, is designed to explore lunar pits, which might include entrances to caves. The RI is primarily sited at Carnegie Mellon's main campus in Newell-Simon hall. building on Fifth Avenue The
Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a
federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon, with offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and Arlington, Virginia. The SEI publishes books on
software engineering for industry, government and military applications and practices. The organization is known for its
Capability Maturity Model The
Human–Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) is a division of the School of Computer Science and is considered one of the leading centers of
human–computer interaction research, integrating computer science, design, social science, and learning science. Such interdisciplinary collaboration is the hallmark of research done throughout the university. The
Language Technologies Institute (LTI) is another unit of the School of Computer Science and is famous for being one of the leading research centers in the area of
language technologies. The primary research focus of the institute is on
machine translation,
speech recognition,
speech synthesis,
information retrieval,
parsing and
information extraction. Until 1996, the institute existed as the Center for Machine Translation that was established in 1986. From 1996 onwards, it started awarding graduate degrees and the name was changed to Language Technologies Institute. The
Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department, one of the seven departments in the
School of Computer Science, was established in 2007 (as Lane Center for Computational Biology), officially became a department within the School of Computer Science in 2009, and named the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department in 2023. The department is the leader in developing computational methodologies to advance biomedical research. Carnegie Mellon is also home to the
Carnegie School of management and economics. This intellectual school grew out of the
Tepper School of Business in the 1950s and 1960s and focused on the intersection of behavioralistm and management. Several management theories, most notably
bounded rationality and the behavioral
theory of the firm, were established by Carnegie School management scientists and economists. Carnegie Mellon also develops cross-disciplinary and university-wide institutes and initiatives to take advantage of strengths in various colleges and departments and develop solutions in critical social and technical problems. To date, these have included the
Cylab Security and Privacy Institute, the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, the
Neuroscience Institute, the Simon Initiative, and the Disruptive Healthcare Technology Institute. Carnegie Mellon has made a concerted effort to attract corporate research labs, offices, and partnerships to the Pittsburgh campus.
Apple Inc.,
Intel,
Google,
Microsoft,
Disney,
Facebook,
IBM,
General Motors,
Bombardier Inc.,
Yahoo!,
Uber,
Tata Consultancy Services,
Ansys,
Boeing,
Robert Bosch GmbH, and the
Rand Corporation have established a presence on or near campus. In collaboration with Intel, Carnegie Mellon has pioneered research into
claytronics.
International activities In addition to its Pittsburgh campus, Carnegie Mellon has a branch campus in the Middle East,
Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, which offers a full undergraduate curriculum with degree programs in artificial intelligence, computer science, business administration, biology and information systems. The campus is located in
Doha's
Education City which is home to multiple other U.S. universities all of which are funded by the
Qatar Foundation. The
Qatari campus has been the subject of controversy, as Islamic cultural values and laws in Qatar differ greatly from the core values of Carnegie Mellon. Additionally, Carnegie Mellon and other U.S. universities in Education City have been criticized for being essentially complicit in Qatar's corruption, connections with
Hamas and their questionable
human rights record by continuing to operate there. It also has graduate-level extension campuses in
Mountain View, California in the heart of
Silicon Valley (offering masters programs in
Software Engineering and Software Management). The
Tepper School of Business maintains a satellite center in downtown
Manhattan. The
Heinz College, the Institute for Politics and Strategy, and the Department of
Engineering and Public Policy host centers in
Washington, D.C. as part of degree programs, research, and government affairs initiatives as well as being a part of the
University of California, Washington Center. Carnegie Mellon also established the Integrative Media Program at
Steiner Studios in
Brooklyn, New York. Carnegie Mellon also maintains the Carnegie Mellon Los Angeles Center in
North Hollywood, California where students in the Master of Entertainment Industry Management program are required to relocate to Los Angeles in their second year and attend classes at this facility. Carnegie Mellon's
Information Networking Institute offers graduate programs in
Athens, Greece and
Kobe, Japan, in collaboration with
Athens Information Technology and the Hyogo Institute of Information Education Foundation, respectively. In the fall of 2007, the cities of
Aveiro and
Lisbon, Portugal were added to the
Information Networking Institute's remote locations. The Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D) offers graduate programs in
Coimbra, Portugal. The Entertainment Technology Center offers graduate programs in Portugal, Japan, and Singapore. The
Human–Computer Interaction Institute offers a master's degree in conjunction with the
University of Madeira, in Portugal at the jointly founded
Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute. The College of Engineering has an international location in
Kigali, Rwanda offering the Master of Science in Information Technology and the Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Libraries The Libraries of Carnegie Mellon include Hunt Library, the Roger Sorrells Engineering & Science Library, the
Mellon Institute Library, the Posner Center, and the Qatar Library. Additionally, the Libraries'
Million Book Project (2001–2008) sparked development of the
Universal Digital Library. The university libraries host a number of full text special collections for public access, including the
Andrew Carnegie Collection,
Herbert A. Simon Collection,
Allen Newell Collection, the
H. John Heinz III Collection, the Pittsburgh Jewish Newspapers Project, and the Posner Memorial Collection. Carnegie Mellon students and faculty have access to the
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and some
University of Pittsburgh libraries through consortial agreements with those institutions. The
Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation (HIBD), dedicated as the Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt Botanical Library in 1961, has been a research division of CMU since its founding. The HIBD is an international bibliographical research and service in the fields of botany, horticulture, and the history of the plant sciences and has a significant research library and art holdings on the 5th floor of Hunt Library. The university's
Software Engineering Institute also houses a research library. Carnegie Mellon also manages the
Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps in Pittsburgh on which students throughout Pittsburgh's universities rely. Carnegie Mellon partners with the
University of Pittsburgh to provide opportunities in
Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps and
Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps to its students. Carnegie Mellon is accredited by the
Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
Collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Carnegie Mellon neighbors the campus of the
University of Pittsburgh, and in some cases, buildings of the two universities are intermingled. This helps to facilitate myriad academic and research collaborations between the two schools, including such projects as the
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the
Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, the Immune Modeling Center, the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, the
University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, as well as the National Science Foundation-supported Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center. Further, the universities also offer multiple dual and joint degree programs such as the
Medical Scientist Training Program, the Molecular Biophysics and Structural Biology Graduate Program, the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology, the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, and the Law and Business Administration program. Some professors hold joint professorships between the two schools, and students at each university may take classes at the other (with appropriate approvals). CMU students and faculty also have access to the University of Pittsburgh library system, as well as the
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. The two universities also co-host academic conferences, such as the 2012 Second Language Research Forum. In 2015, in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh and
UPMC, Carnegie Mellon became a partner of the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance to leverage data analysis in health care. == Discoveries and innovation ==