Undergrads of Top CS PhDs

A strong undergraduate CS education is important for getting into a top CS PhD program. So which universities send the most students to these programs?

In 2020, someone on Reddit manually checked the undergraduate institutions for all Stanford CS PhD students and compiled the results in a post.

A lot has changed over the past five years. ChatGPT launched in 2022 and took the world by storm. CS PhD students are more likely to conduct AI research now than they were five years ago. COVID-19 hit in 2020, and universities handled it differently, potentially influencing students’ career outcomes.

So in 2025, I collected the statistics again to see what’s changed. Unlike the Redditor five years ago, I used ChatGPT to collect and analyze the data rather than manually looking everything up.

github repo: here

Stanford CS PhD

There are 338 Stanford CS PhD students in total. ChatGPT found undergraduate institutions for 328 of them, and I manually found six more. Only four remain unknown. Below are all undergraduate institutions with at least three students (30 total). To see the full list, go to this link.

Compared to 5 years ago, The number of students from the following universities more than doubled: Cornell University, UC San Diego, University of Washington.

Stanford University | 47
University of California, Berkeley | 32
Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 26
Carnegie Mellon University | 10
Tsinghua University | 10
Peking University | 8
Cornell University | 8
University of California, San Diego | 8
Georgia Institute of Technology | 8
Harvard University | 7
University of Washington | 7
University of California, Los Angeles | 5
Princeton University | 5
University of Toronto | 5
University of Pennsylvania | 4
Shanghai Jiao Tong University | 4
Zhejiang University | 4
University of Science and Technology of China | 4
University of Chicago | 4
University of Waterloo | 3
Yale University | 3
California Institute of Technology | 3
Harvey Mudd College | 3
University of Southern California | 3
Birla Institute of Technology and Science | 3
University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign | 3
University of British Columbia | 3
Brown University | 3
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi | 3
Northwestern University | 3

How about CS PhDs at other universities?

MIT, Berkeley, and CMU do not publish consolidated lists of all their CS PhD students. As such, statistics for those universities will be left for future work.