University of Pennsylvania

  • The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the most prestigious in the world. While the university dates its founding to 1740, it was created by Benjamin Franklin and other Philadelphia citizens in 1749.
  • Penn was one of nine colonial colleges chartered before the U.S. Declaration of Independence when Benjamin Franklin, the university’s founder and first president, advocated for an educational institution that trained leaders in academia, commerce, and public service.
  • The university has four undergraduate schools as well as twelve graduate and professional schools. Schools enrolling undergraduates include the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Wharton School, and the School of Nursing. Among its highly ranked graduate schools are its law school, whose first professor James Wilson, wrote the first draft of the United States Constitution, its medical school, the first in North America, and Wharton, the first collegiate business school. Penn’s endowment is US$20.7 billion, putting it amongst the wealthiest academic institutions in the world, and its 2019 research budget was $1.02 billion.
  • U.S. News & World Report’s 2022 rankings place Penn seventh among national universities in the United Statesand Center for World University Rankings’ (“CWUR”) 2020/2021 survey also ranks Penn as the eighth best university in the world. The Princeton Review included Penn in its Dream Colleges list in 2015. As reported by USA Today, Penn was ranked first in the United States by College Factual for 2015. In their 2021 edition, Penn was ranked tenth in the nation by QS (Quacquarelli Symonds).[229] In the 2020 edition, Penn was ranked 15th in the world by the QS World University Rankings and in 2019, 17th by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) and 12th by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2019, it ranked 12th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings.
  • According to the 2015 ARWU ranking, Penn is also the eighth- and ninth-best university in the world for economics/business and social sciences studies, respectively. University of Pennsylvania ranked 12th among 300 Best World Universities in 2012 compiled by Human Resources & Labor Review (HRLR) on Measurements of World’s Top 300 Universities Graduates’ Performance. The Center for Measuring University Performance places Penn in the first tier of the United States’ top research universities (tied with Columbia, MIT and Stanford), based on research expenditures, faculty awards, PhD granted and other academic criteria. Penn was also ranked 18th of all U.S. colleges and universities in terms of R&D expenditures in fiscal year 2013 by the National Science Foundation.
  • The High Impact Universities research performance index ranks Penn eighth in the world, whereas the 2010 Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities (published by the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan) ranks Penn 11th in the world for 2007, 2008 and 2010 and ninth for 2009.
  • The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers measures universities’ research productivity, research impact, and research excellence based on the scientific papers published by their academic staff. The SCImago Institutions Rankings World Report 2012, which ranks world universities, national institutions and academies in terms of research output, ranks Penn seventh nationally among U.S. universities (2nd in the Ivy League behind Harvard) and 28th in the world overall (the first being France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique).
  • The Mines ParisTech International Professional Ranking, which ranks universities on the basis of the number of alumni listed among CEOs in the 500 largest worldwide companies, ranks Penn 11th worldwide and second nationally behind Harvard.
  • According to a U.S. News article in 2010, Penn is tied for second (tied with Dartmouth College and Tufts University) for the number of undergraduate alumni who are current Fortune 100 CEOs.
  • Forbes ranked Penn 17th, based on a variety of criteria.
  • In 2022, Poets & Quants ranked the undergraduate Wharton business school as the top business school in the nation for the fifth year in a row.
  • Graduate and professional programs: Among its professional schools, the school of education was ranked number one in 2021 and Wharton School of Business was ranked number one in 2022, the communication, dentistry, medicine, nursing, and veterinary medicine schools rank in the top 5 nationally.
  • Penn’s Law School was ranked number 6 in 2022 and Design school, and its School of Social Policy and Practice are ranked in the top 10 In the 2010 QS Global 200 Business Schools Report, Penn was ranked second in North America.