American University

How it scores

Research and Alumni outcomes are percentiles among 2,287 universities; alumni outcomes are counted per student. Admissions & earnings is the position among universities in the same country (United States).

Note: It has 952 core papers, below the Research Index threshold of 1,500, so its citation shares are shrunk toward the median of similarly small universities before scoring.

Admissions, outcomes and alumni

Admit rate

62.0% src

Average SAT

1,381 src

Yield (admits who enrol)

22% src

Median earnings 10 years after entry

$77,370 src

40-year return on investment (Georgetown CEW)

$2.49M src

Graduation rate (6 years)

75% src

Internationally notable alumni (Wikidata)

54 src

Heads of state or government (Wikidata)

8 src

Founders, billionaires and $30M+ alumni

not on the published top lists; estimated

Students (undergraduate headcount / total FTE, IPEDS)

7,266 / 11,298 src

Each figure links to its source. Admissions and earnings figures are comparable only within a country.

Research Index

The Research Index ranks a university only when it has at least 1,500 fractionally counted core publications over four years, so that a handful of highly cited papers can’t produce an extreme score. Its field ranks (where it has 200 or more papers in a field) and all of its data are shown here.

The numbers behind it (2020–2023)

Papers in the top 10% of their field

9.8% (8.5%–11.3%)

Papers in the top 1% of their field

1.3% (0.9%–1.9%)

Top-10% papers (fractional count)

93

All papers (fractional count)

952.2

International co-authored

38.9%

Open access

60.9%

Papers from 2020–23 since retracted

0 (0.00 per 1,000)

Core publications, fractional counting, field-normalised citation shares. Brackets show Leiden’s stability interval. Collaboration and open-access shares use full counting and aren’t field-normalised. Retraction counts come from the Retraction Watch database and include publishers’ mass retractions as well as honest-error retractions; a retraction is not by itself evidence of misconduct, and the count is never scored.

By field

Position over time

The same method applied to each 4-year publication window. The number of ranked universities grows from period to period, so position is shown as a share of the field.