The Early College at Guilford has been recognized as one of the nation's top public high schools by Newsweek Magazine. The Early College ranked fourteenth in 2007 and twenty-first in 2008 on a list of 1300+ public high schools. In the US News "Best High Schools of 2009", The Early College ranked seventeenth out of 20,000+ schools examined. In 2016, the US News ranked the Early College at Guilford first in North Carolina, second in the nation out of the best 500 public schools for STEM related fields, and #23 in the nation overall.