University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania is a private research university in the University City neighborhood of West Philadelphia. It traces its founding to 1740, and Benjamin Franklin shaped its early direction. Penn opened the first medical school in the American colonies in 1765 and the first collegiate business school, Wharton, in 1881. Its campus covers about 300 acres along the Schuylkill River.

Penn has twelve schools: Arts and Sciences, the Wharton School, Engineering and Applied Science, the Perelman School of Medicine, Nursing, the Carey Law School, the Weitzman School of Design, the Graduate School of Education, Social Policy and Practice, the Annenberg School for Communication, Dental Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Its engineering school built ENIAC, an early general-purpose electronic computer, in 1946. Penn Medicine and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania support major biomedical research, including the mRNA work behind COVID-19 vaccines.

Penn enrolls about 28,000 students, and more than half of them are graduate and professional students. International students come from more than 100 countries and are concentrated in the graduate schools. More than two dozen Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the university. Its alumni include Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai.

Penn is known for its MBA, JD, MD and nursing degrees and for doctoral programs in the sciences and social sciences. Under its One University policy, students can take courses across schools, and dual degrees are common, such as JD/MBA and MD/PhD. PhD students typically receive multiyear funding packages. The university runs on semesters. Graduate students have access to Center City Philadelphia and regional rail to New York and Washington.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, University of Pennsylvania lists 185 graduate programs across 51 subjects: 85 master's programs and 82 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in education, biology and area studies. University of Pennsylvania holds rank 10 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.