<p>Don’t spend too much time fretting about department rankings. You are about to be an undergraduate–not a graduate student–and it is the Ph.D program that is reflected in the rankings. Its true that, overall, Duke has a stronger political science department than Brandeis. Duke’s department is significantly larger–and therefore covers more subfields more in depth than the relatively small Brandeis faculty could possibly do. That is an important consideration to a graduate student in one of those particular subfields. It is virtually meaningless, however, to an undergraduate. You will not have sufficient time to go very deep into any subfield.</p>
<p>Brandeis’ political science department, while small, is nonetheless excellent. And in some subfields, IR for example, it is among the top programs. Professor Art, for example, while a full-time professor at Brandeis, is also on the faculty at Harvard and MIT. but if you speak to him you’ll learn that, for a variety of reasons, he prefers to teach at Brandeis. The cross-fertilization of faculty is an advantage of being in Boston that you won’t find in either Durham or Houston.</p>