<p>My daughter is interested in studying psychology, and would love to hear what schools are considered good in this discipline. A place where an undergrad could have opportunities to do research would be a good place.</p>
<p>Do psychology organizations cite any colleges as being distinguished or good?</p>
<p>Thanks for any input.</p>
<p>Columbia and Penn and Chicago have distinguished psych departments. plenty of research too</p>
<p>Yes, JohnnyK nailed it, but fit is also a very important factor in this process, if not THE most important one.</p>
<p>The USNews' top 10 picks on pysch are:
Stanford
UC Berkeley
U of Michigan
Yale
Harvard
Princeton
UCLA
U of Illinois
Carnegie Mellon
U of Wisconsin</p>
<p>More or less in that order. Unfortunately, psych is not one of Columbia, Penn, or Chicago's fortes. These schools are strong rather in traditional disciplines.</p>
<p>And that would be for grad school. Find me one person who went to UIllinois instead of Columbia or Penn for undergrad and I'll show you a Columbia/Penn reject.</p>
<p>I've heard Stanford's program is the best, but any top college will offer a good psych program.</p>
<p>Stanford is best for Social Psych, Yale for Clinical, Minnesota for Child, etc.
But, there are lots of good programs in each area.</p>
<p>joecollegedad,
According to data drawn from collegeboard.com, following are USNWR Top 50 colleges where 5% or more of the declared majors are in psychology. I can't vouch for the strength of these programs, but I think it is likely that the top undergrad programs are among this group of schools.</p>
<p>13% UCLA
12% UC Irvine
11% Wash U StL
10% Dartmouth
10% Emory
10% U Rochester
9% Duke
9% Northwestern
9% U Virginia
9% Tufts
9% U North Carolina
9% Brandeis
9% W & M
9% UC Davis
9% UC S Barbara
8% U Michigan
8% UCSD
8% Case Western
7% Harvard
7% Vanderbilt
7% Wake Forest
7% U Illinois UC
6% Yale
6% Rice
6% Notre Dame
6% Lehigh
6% U Washington
6% Tulane
5% Stanford
5% U Chicago
5% Columbia
5% Brown
5% UC Berkeley
5% Georgetown
5% USC
5% Boston College
5% NYU
5% U Florida
5% Penn State</p>
<p>joecollegedad:</p>
<p>So many colleges have strong psychology programs, as indicated by several posters, that you can make an initial list with highly selectives and less selectives using your own (or student's I mean) aspects of "fit" such as location, size, cost, athletics, variety of musical groups, % of students with pink hair or any other type of student characteristic. </p>
<p>Once you have a list, you can go online to the colleges and explore their psych departments: the list of course offerrings, interdisciplinary majors, combined majors or special programs for UGs, and the research opportunities. You or your student can also email these questions directly to someone in the uni's college of arts and sciences. I think one question more parents and prospective students ought to ask at different colleges is what kind of financial support there is for UG research. Good luck in your search.</p>
<p>For what it's worth, here are the top 10 psychology Ph.D. programs from the last National Research Council ranking in the '90s:</p>
<ol>
<li>Stanford University 72 </li>
<li>University of Michigan--Ann Arbor 70 </li>
<li>Yale University 70 </li>
<li>University of California--Los Angeles 70 </li>
<li>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 70 </li>
<li>Harvard University 69 </li>
<li>University of Minnesota--Twin Cities 68 </li>
<li>University of Pennsylvania 67 </li>
<li>University of California--Berkeley 67 </li>
<li>University of California--San Diego 67 </li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon University 67</li>
</ol>
<p><a href="http://www.socialpsychology.org/ranking.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.socialpsychology.org/ranking.htm</a></p>
<p>"Once you have a list, you can go online to the colleges and explore their psych departments: the list of course offerrings, interdisciplinary majors, combined majors or special programs for UGs, and the research opportunities. You or your student can also email these questions directly to someone in the uni's college of arts and sciences. I think one question more parents and prospective students ought to ask at different colleges is what kind of financial support there is for UG research. Good luck in your search."</p>
<p>Bigred07 is so correct. So many undergraduate programs offer great research opportunities - lacs as well as universities. I picked one lac, Allegheny, because I know of it - it has, since 1920, ranked in the top 3% of undergraduate schools for producing PhDs in psychology. At this school all seniors, in every major, must complete a comprehensive (capstone) paper, which may be in addition to other research - you can check out the types of research they are doing under "Comps Titles/abstract" here:</p>
<p>Your child should explore the psych deparpartments of any schools he or she is otherwise interested in and explore the department.</p>
<p>There are probably dozens of Illinois kids who could have gone to Columbia or Penn who choose to go to UI because it is great and cheap. The highly competitive Illinois Math and Science Academy sends most of its grads to UI.</p>