<p>At the graduate level: Penn Medicine (the first med school in the USA) and Wharton are both ranked #3; Penn Law is #6 (tied with UChicago); Penn’s Annenberg School of Communication consistently ranks in the top 5; Penn Vet, Dentistry, School of Education, Penn Design and Penn’s Arts and Sciences are all pretty consistently in the top 10. Only the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Social Policy and Practice are not top-ranked.
At the undergraduate level: Penn’s Nursing School and the Wharton School are both ranked #1. The Engineering School I think is ranked #29 (but all Ivy engineering schools with the exception of Cornell are in that range), and Penn’s Bioengineering is #6, Penn’s Nanotechnology is also very strongly regarded by most tech-journals and has been ranked #1 (not US News). As far as the liberal arts go, no concrete rankings are compiled anywhere with the exception of the Gourman Report where Penn’s arts and sciences departments all place in the top 10-15 and several place in the top 5.
Pioneering developments in the field of linguistics were made at Penn by Noam Chomsky and his teacher Zellig Harris (the department has been consistently regarded as the best in the country). Penn has the oldest Psychology department in North America (also top-ranked), the Penn faculty founded the American Psychological Association in 1892, Lightner Whitmer at Penn created the entire field of clinical pscyhology (and the first psychological clinic 1896), Morris Viteles started the field of industrial psychology, Ulrich Neisser wrote ‘Cognitive Psychology’ at Penn, and Twitmyer (who discovered the knee-jerk reflex) discovered the conditioned reflex at Penn (yes, before Pavlov did). Penn’s Psychology department continues to be a leader in the field.
Penn’s English and History departments are also extremely well-regarded and have won several departmental rewards (their faculty also has an extremely high conc.of Guggennheim fellows and Pulitzer prize winners). Penn’s English dept. has won more awards than any other in the College. Anthropology, Architecture, Economics, Regional Studies (Penn has the most comprehensive language center in the country), Neuroscience are all at or near the top of their fields. Archeology and Ancient History also benefit from Penn’s Museum which houses the largest collection of Egyptian artefacts outside of Egypt and the British museum (including the third-largest Sphinx in the world after the ones in Giza and the Louvre), and the professors are at the top of their fields.
There is obviously a lot more, several departments have rich, important histories and impressive records (look up architecture for instance). Penn’s College also has several important collections of rare books and artefacts that draw scholars from around the world.
Penn is an exceptional all-round university and it’s current standing is not simply the result of one department.</p>