A decade strong: ASU takes top spot in innovation for 10th year in a row

For the 10th year in a row, Arizona State University is No. 1 in innovation in the newly released annual “Best Colleges” 2025 rankings by U.S. News & World Report — just one of many top rankings earned by the university.

ASU has placed first in the peer-nominated category every year since the “most innovative” category was created by U.S. News & World Report magazine, and the university has ranked ahead of MIT and Stanford University each time.

“Receiving the top innovation ranking from our peers for a decade is significant, as it affirms that our enterprise-wide innovation mindset is deeply tied to our institutional identity,” said ASU President Michael M. Crow.

“ASU works hard to find and act on every opportunity at every level of teaching, discovery and operations to collaborate and manifest better solutions. We are proud of the variety and scope of impact we are making.”

The latest accolade joins a series of repeated No. 1 rankings in recent years for high-impact areas including innovation, sustainability and impact.

In the just-released STARS Sustainable Campus Index from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, ASU ranked No. 1 in the United States and No. 2 in the world for its sustainability practices, ahead of Stanford, Cornell and Colorado State University. The index also put ASU in the top 10 worldwide for six “impact areas” of the assessment: No. 1 in air and climate, No. 2 in transportation, No. 3 in investment and finance, No. 7 in research, No. 9 in curriculum and No. 10 in public engagement.

For the fifth consecutive year, Times Higher Education ranked ASU No. 1 this summer in the U.S. for its work through education, research and practice in alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. For the overall ranking, ASU came in ahead of Michigan State University, Penn State University and MIT.

For the third consecutive year, ASU was the No. 1 public university for hosting international students by the 2023 Institute of International Education’s Open Doors Report, ahead of the University of Illinois, Purdue and the University of Michigan.

Other No. 1 rankings over the past several years include:

• No. 1 in research expenditures for anthropology, by the National Science Foundation (2023), ahead of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Arizona.
• No. 1 in transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and other sciences, by the National Science Foundation (2023), ahead of Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pittsburgh and Ohio State University.
• No. 1 journalism school in top overall awards for news, by the Broadcast Education Association (2022–24), ahead of Syracuse, the University of Florida and the University of Southern California.
• No. 1 in the world for international trade, by the QS International Trade Rankings (2023–24), ahead of the University of Michigan, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania domestically, and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, University of Toronto in Canada and IMD in Switzerland, internationally.
• Explore more on the ASU rankings website.

In the past year, ASU has made a huge impact in several areas:

Microelectronics

Earlier this month, five projects in the ASU-led Southwest Advanced Prototyping Hub won nearly $30 million in federal funding to launch projects that will boost national security by enhancing U.S. microchip-making capability. In the spring, ASU entered into a partnership with DECA Technologies to collaborate on North America’s first Fan-Out Wafer-Level Packaging research and development capability.

Space

Last October, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted the Psyche spacecraft into the sky, the first NASA deep-space mission led by ASU and the culmination of a 12-year undertaking led by Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Foundation and Regents Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, vice president of the ASU Interplanetary Initiative and the principal investigator of the Psyche mission. The spacecraft is traveling to the Psyche asteroid, which scientists believe could be part of a metal-rich interior of a planetesimal, a building block of a rocky planet.

It's a mission that reaches far beyond the science team: ASU has involved students and the community in the Psyche mission through art and education.

Heat mitigation

Arizona passed a law in the spring that guarantees mobile-home owners’ right to install cooling measures, thanks in large part to the work of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at ASU, an interdisciplinary team that worked for more than five years on the problem of extreme heat and mobile homes in the Valley.

Big grants

ASU won two big grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development: $80 million to create new learning opportunities and resources that support the success of young people in Africa, and $35 million to lead a large, interdisciplinary initiative to help reduce gender-based violence in El Salvador, with the goal of stemming the flow of irregular migration to the U.S.

In addition, the U.S. National Science Foundation chose ASU to lead a $15 million multi-institutional enterprise to confront climate challenges in the Southwest and spur economic development in the region.

Learn more about grants for solutions-oriented research on ASU News.

Artificial intelligence

In early 2024, ASU announced that it was the first higher education institution to collaborate with OpenAI, the AI research and deployment company behind ChatGPT. That led to the AI Innovation Challenge, in which more than 500 proposals for AI projects were submitted across the university. More than 200 of those projects are underway, including a bot to improve health care workers’ interviewing skills and the use of ChatGPT to enhance writing skills.

Top awards

Several of ASU’s community of faculty and administrators have won prestigious awards over the past year. Water expert Amber Wutich, President's Professor and director of the Center for Global Health in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, won a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, only the third ASU faculty member to do so.

Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, executive director of ASU Gammage and vice president for cultural affairs at ASU, won a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater.

Regents Professor Michelene “Micki” Chi won the Yidan Prize for Education Research, the biggest award in education and an international honor that recognized her innovative approaches that help learners reach their full potential.

The “most innovative” ranking by U.S. News & World Report is based on peer voting. Institutions were nominated by college presidents, provosts and admissions deans across the country, and schools were chosen based on who is making the most innovative improvements in curriculum, faculty, students, campus life, technology and facilities.

ASU also was tied for No. 7 nationwide for undergraduate teaching — ahead of Yale, Stanford and Harvard universities — and No. 3 among public universities for the first-year college experience, ahead of the University of Michigan, Purdue University and Ohio State University.

In addition, ASU ranked highly in areas that are important for careers. The university was in the top 20 — along with Stanford, Cornell and Purdue universities — for service learning, in which students can apply what they learn in class in community activities. In the category of co-ops and internships for undergraduates, ASU ranked in the top 15 nationwide along with MIT, Duke and Harvard, and fifth among public universities, along with Georgia Tech, Purdue and Clemson — all part of continued, successful results in boosting the employability of ASU graduates.

Several ASU undergraduate degree programs ranked in the top 20 nationwide in the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges for 2025:

• No. 2 for supply chain management and logistics — one of a number of top rankings for W. P. Carey School of Business — ahead of MIT, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the University of Texas at Austin.
• No. 9 (tied) for business management information systems, W. P. Carey School; ahead of New York University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan.
• No. 9 for production/operations management, W. P. Carey School; ahead of the University of Indiana; the University of California, Berkeley; and NYU.
• No. 10 for analytics, W. P. Carey School; ahead of Indiana University, Cornell and the University of Texas at Dallas.
• No. 12 for business management, W. P. Carey School; ahead of the University of Southern California, Cornell and Pennsylvania State University.
• No. 13 for accounting, W. P. Carey School; ahead of UC Berkeley, the University of Washington and Michigan State University.
• No. 13 for environmental/environment health engineering, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering; ahead of Princeton, Yale and Rice universities. 
• No. 16 for civil engineering, Fulton Schools; ahead of UCLA, the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin.
• No. 17 (tied) for industrial manufacturing, Fulton Schools; along with USC, Ohio State University and the University of Pittsburgh.
• No. 18 (tied) for cybersecurity computer science, Fulton Schools; ahead of Duke University and the Rochester Institute of Technology.
• No. 19 (tied) for electrical/electronic communications engineering, Fulton Schools; ahead of Harvard, Columbia and the University of Wisconsin.
• No. 19 for artificial intelligence computer science, Fulton Schools; ahead of Duke, Purdue and Yale.
• No. 19 (tied) for finance, W. P. Carey School; ahead of Georgetown University, USC and Emory University.

Additionally, Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation’s undergraduate nursing program rose to No. 39 (tied) from No. 52, ahead of Florida State University, Purdue and George Mason University. ASU's undergraduate psychology programs rose to No. 42 (tied) from No. 51, ahead of Stony Brook University, the University of Iowa and Temple University. The Fulton Schools’ overall undergraduate engineering program was tied for No. 35, ahead of Michigan State University, Iowa State University and the University of Arizona.

Find the full rankings on the U.S. News & World Report website.