For the 13th year in a row, the Princeton Review has named DigiPen one of the top five game design schools in North America and abroad. The college admission services company ranked DigiPen No. 5 on its 2022 list of the top 50 undergraduate schools, and No. 8 on its list of the top 25 graduate schools.
“It’s an honor for us and every single Dragon to be ranked as one of the top North American game design schools for yet another year,” Christopher Comair, Chief Operating Officer for the Redmond campus, said. “It’s the people within our physical and virtual walls that make it happen, and we are all proud of each other every day.”
The school rankings were based on a 2021 survey of administrators at 150 institutions offering courses and degrees in game design. Over 40 data points were evaluated to determine the rankings, including curriculum, faculty, facilities, employment rates, graduate salaries, alumni success, and more.
DigiPen offered the world’s very first bachelor’s degree in game development in 1998 with the debut of the BS in Real-Time Interactive Simulation program. DigiPen graduates have gone on to contribute to over 1,750 commercial games as programmers, designers, artists, sound designers, and more — working on many titles considered among the greatest games of all-time. In 2021 alone, DigiPen graduates contributed to an impressive list of hits at AAA and indie game studios. Among them were “Game of the Year” winners and contenders like Halo Infinite, Psychonauts 2, Metroid Dread, Life Is Strange: True Colors, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Graduates also worked on some of Twitch’s most streamed online multiplayer games, like Apex Legends, Fortnite, Valorant, and League of Legends.
DigiPen students enter the industry prepared for success, having already developed a number of original video game projects throughout their school career. Multidisciplinary student game project teams collaborate to develop both 2D and 3D games of their own design, which have earned 425,000 unique downloads on Steam, as well as awards and recognition at events like the Intel University Games Showcase, The Rookie Awards, and the Independent Games Festival.
For more information, you can view the full rankings and report on the Princeton Review’s website.