Virginia Tech’s part-time MBA program in the Washington metropolitan area is ranked No. 16 in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report’s America’s Best Graduate Schools 2016 survey released today. The program climbed 30 spots from the report’s 2015 ranking.

The program is based in the Pamplin College of Business and known as the Evening MBA. “Our top 20 ranking makes us the top ranked school in Virginia for part-time MBA programs,” said Robert Sumichrast, dean of Pamplin. “The ranking also puts us among the top 10 part-time MBA programs at public schools.”

The University of California-Berkeley is the nation’s top ranked school; Pamplin tied with programs at Rice University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the University of South Carolina. Georgia Tech was ranked in a group behind Virginia Tech.

The top 20 ranking “continues the improvement we are seeing in our programs based in the National Capital Region with the Master of Information Technology recently ranked #2 in the country,” Sumichrast said.

“In updating Pamplin’s strategic plan over the past year, we have focused some of our resources on our evening and other forms of MBA while suspending admission to the full-time program,” he said. “The results are beginning to pay off, as demonstrated in the rankings released today.”

Other Virginia Tech graduate programs received accolades in the 2016 survey. The graduate engineering program is ranked 21st in the nation, tied with Northwestern University in Illinois, to maintain its same overall ranking from last year. In addition, the program is the first listed from Virginia.

“The Virginia Tech College of Engineering continues to thrive because of our hands-on, minds-on philosophy of education, an approach made possible by our faculty members, who guide and work closely with our graduate students,” said Richard C. Benson, dean of the College of Engineering. “Our graduate students are making groundbreaking changes for the better in energy production, cybersecurity, big data, environmental health, and most recently robotics, where Hokie engineers successfully demonstrated a prototype firefighting robot that can work on naval ships.”

Further, in the American Society of Engineering Education’s 2013 rankings – the most recent year for which data is available – the College of Engineering ranked as the 10thlargest producer of engineering doctorates in the nation. “It is the first time in our history that we have been in the Top 10,” Benson said.

According to data from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, Virginia Tech is the commonwealth’s top producer of STEM-H degrees among public institutions.

The 2016 rankings also recognized programs and departments within the College of Engineering, including the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at seventh for industrial/ manufacturing programs, the Charles E. Via Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s civil engineering program ranking 9th and the environmental portion ranking 10th, and the biological systems engineering department, also part of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, ranking seventh among biological/agricultural programs.

The U.S. News & World Report’s 2016 survey also ranked Virginia Tech’s graduate programs in education at 88th in the nation.

The 2016 report also includes some ranking information that is not updated every year. Three programs in the College of Science received recognition with data first published in 2014 ranking the chemistry program at 60th in the nation and earth sciences program at 30th, while data published in 2013 ranked psychology at 67th.

The university’s public affairs program in the School of Public and International Affairs, part of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, ranks 37th in the nation, using data first published in 2012.

U.S. News and World Report’s graduate rankings of colleges, published annually since 1987, are based on several categories of data gathered from the surveyed schools, plus peer assessments by deans, senior faculty, and other professionals in their respective fields. Rankings of the specialty programs are based solely on peer assessments.

View the full new rankings and data on the U.S. News Graduate School Compass.