U.S. News & World Report released its annual college rankings for 2025 this past September, ranking the University of Indianapolis at 296 of 436 national universities.
In addition to the overall ranking, UIndy placed 297 of 433 in top performers on social mobility, as well as several ranked undergraduate programs: engineering was ranked 150 out of 286 and nursing at 218 out of 686.
The rankings show some favorability to certain schools according to UIndy President Tanuja Singh. The branding of a university plays a significant role in the rankings, and increasing UIndy’s brand recognition is a goal of Singh’s through marketing the university more.
“Twenty percent of the ranking is how your peers evaluate you,” Singh said, “which essentially means other provosts, other deans, and that is really a part of marketing. How well you market your program has a lot to do with how well you are ranked.”
According to U.S. News & World Report, rankings are calculated by 19 different categories. Graduation rates and “graduation rate performance” follow peer assessments, accounting for 16% and 10% of the ranking, respectively.
“As far as the overall ranking is concerned, we are doing better than we did last time,” Singh said. “We have made progress and we are continuing to make progress in that particular area. That is something we will keep focusing upon, but not excessively.”
The primary areas of focus for Singh are retention, which makes up 5% of rankings, as well as student outcomes, which make up 57% of rankings. Singh said a point of pride for UIndy is that students get to participate in experiential learning beginning their freshman year, while many other universities do not give students that opportunity until their senior capstone projects.
The R.B. Annis School of Engineering at UIndy incorporates experiential learning through its “DesignSpine” program. According to Associate Dean and Director of Engineering Ken Reid, over the course of a traditional undergraduate experience, students would have experience on three team projects for real clients and have given 12 formal presentations. Students typically start the program in their sophomore year.
“We had a client for a ‘DesignSpine’ project who said they had two engineers, one from Purdue, one from UIndy on a team out in the field and they had to go into a hole to work some equipment and the Purdue student was really reluctant to,” Reid said. “She said the UIndy student jumped right in and knew what he was doing.”
In the future, Reid would like to see UIndy ranked above 100 in the engineering rankings. Reid said he believes it is possible considering the engineering school was founded in 2017 and has already made substantial progress towards that goal.
“We expect to enroll incoming classes of 100 to 125 every year,” Reid said. “We’re definitely in a good growth place. A lot of our scholarship from our faculty is being presented in national conferences, and that’s how you get your name well-known with other universities.”
Singh said she would like for UIndy to be ranked above 250 overall in the future. Ranking universities according to one scale presents its own challenges, Singh said, since every university has different goals and resources. Singh believes focusing on individual programs is more meaningful as far as rankings are concerned, and UIndy tends to do well in those rankings.
