Good universities for linguistics?

College Search & Selection
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<p>Good schools for linguistics? Just a bit about me...
SAT 2200
UW GPA 3.75
13 APs and 6 honors
Semester study abroad soph
7 URI courses (6 linguistics related)
Cross country, ind track, out track
Parents went to mizzou
Top public school
Interact club
NHS
Part time Summer job 2 years
Gay-Straight Alliance President </p>

<p>Thanks :)</p>

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<p>I’d suggest the Defense Language Institute if you are willing to go into the military for 4 years - (about 1.5 of those would be spent at DLI before spending a couple years as a translator).</p>

<p>MIddlebury College comes to mind as well, but they are highly selective in terms of admissions and there are never any ‘sure things’ there. I don’t know of any schools in Missouri that just blow me away in terms of that field.</p>

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<p>Oh I’m in Rhode Island now. And thanks that really gives me a starting point :slight_smile: will look into it</p>

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<p>As a DLI grad, I can’t say enough good things about that program, but keep in mind it likely won’t be in French or something romantic…it is far more likely to be in Arabic these days. </p>

<p>After my earlier post, I remembered a few more - Indiana, Wisconsin, Cornell, and Columbia are where some of my coworkers did their later work.</p>

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<p>Northwestern has a good program and atmosphere around it</p>

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<p>Thanks for the help :)</p>

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<p>^i second northwestern. Your gpa is a bit low for it but your sat is excellent.</p>

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<p>[Curriculum:</a> Department of Linguistics at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences - Northwestern University](<a href=“http://www.linguistics.northwestern.edu/undergraduate/curriculum/index.html]Curriculum:”>http://www.linguistics.northwestern.edu/undergraduate/curriculum/index.html)
This is what your learning goals would be at Northwestern it could be an excellent reach school for you BEST OF LUCK</p>

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<p>Some posters may be confusing linguistics with language study. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguists study phonetics/phonemics (the sound systems of languages), morphology (word-formation), syntax (phrase and sentence structures), semantics (meaning), and other aspects of language (including language change over time or the use of computational models to process language in machine translation or speech-to-text systems).</p>

<p>Universities with strong linguistics programs include (in approximate order of selectivity):</p>

<p>MIT, Stanford
Penn, Brown, Chicago
Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern
Berkeley
USC
UCLA
UT-Austin</p>

<p>This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. </p>

<p>LACs with relatively strong linguistics programs include Pomona, Swarthmore, Carleton, and Reed. I ordinarily tend to prefer LACs to research universities, but this is one field that most LACs cannot easily support due to its interdisciplinary nature and low demand.</p>

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<p>Email your URI professors and get their opinions. They should know where the best programs are.</p>

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<p>The best department in linguistics is MIT, namely because of its association with Chomsky. I should note that at MIT the linguistics and philosophy department have merged into a single department. After MIT, i’d say it’s difficult to say what the top programs are.</p>

<p>Here are some of the universities where professors at top departments completed their dissertations (I’ll only be including universities that have alumni represented at one or more of these universities:)</p>

<p>at MIT (most faculty don’t list their CV so these are the few i could find):</p>

<p>[MIT</a> Department of Linguistics: People: Faculty: Noam Chomsky<a href=“MIT”>/url</a></p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://web.mit.edu/albright/www/]Adam”&gt;Adam Albright]Adam</a> Albright<a href=“UCLA”>/url</a></p>

<p><a href=“http://web.mit.edu/fintel/cv.pdf[/url]”>http://web.mit.edu/fintel/cv.pdf](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/]MIT”>http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/)</a> (UMass-Amherst)</p>

<p>At USC:</p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1016450]ling”&gt;http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1016450]ling</a> faculty display > Department of Linguistics > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<a href=“UCLA”>/url</a></p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1010318]ling”&gt;http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1010318]ling</a> faculty display > Department of Linguistics > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<a href=“UCLA”>/url</a></p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003147]ling”&gt;http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003147]ling</a> faculty display > Department of Linguistics > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<a href=“UCLA”>/url</a></p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003570]ling”&gt;http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003570]ling</a> faculty display > Department of Linguistics > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<a href=“UCLA,%20in%20engineering!”>/url</a></p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003309]ling”&gt;http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003309]ling</a> faculty display > Department of Linguistics > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<a href=“MIT”>/url</a></p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003678]ling”&gt;http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003678]ling</a> faculty display > Department of Linguistics > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<a href=“MIT”>/url</a></p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003854]ling”&gt;http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003854]ling</a> faculty display > Department of Linguistics > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<a href=“MIT”>/url</a></p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1038343]ling”&gt;http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1038343]ling</a> faculty display > Department of Linguistics > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<a href=“UMass-Amherst”>/url</a></p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1008282]ling”&gt;http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1008282]ling</a> faculty display > Department of Linguistics > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<a href=“Penn”>/url</a></p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003591]ling”&gt;http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/ling/ling_faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003591]ling</a> faculty display > Department of Linguistics > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<a href=“Penn”>/url</a></p>

<p>at UCLA (since these are all listed on one page, i won’t note individual professors):</p>

<p>UCLA: 3 current faculty, 2 emiretus faculty</p>

<p>Umass-Amherst: 1 current faculty</p>

<p>MIT: 6 current faculty</p>

<p>Penn: 1 emiretus faculty</p>

<p>Yale: 1 emiretus faculty (there’s also one on USC’s faculty but i don’t feel like looking it up again.)</p>

<p>Honorable mentions: Rutgers: 2 current faculty (I only saw Rutgers faculty on UCLA’s webpage, and it’s probably an extension of their phil. program. But i wouldn’t be surprised to see this faculty teaching at other universities as well.)</p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/196-faculty.html]Faculty[/url”&gt;Faculty - Department of Linguistics - UCLA]Faculty[/url</a>]</p>

<p>As you can see OP, the numbers seem to indicate that its MIT, UCLA, Penn, U-Mass Amherst, then perhaps Yale and Rutgers, of the three institutions i surveyed.</p>

<p>An important point that i want to make is that a fair chunk of these people did their undergraduate work at Ivies, or small private colleges. That doesn’t mean you can’t get into top programs from the other schools (I know a girl who got into UCLA’s linguistics program for UCLA undergrad) but it might be best to go to a university that will give you the best of both worlds. These schools would probably include MIT, Yale, Penn, and maybe Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, and USC; UCLA, UMass-Amherst, and Rutgers would also be excellent options too however.</p>

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<p>

All 3 of Chomsky’s degrees (BA, MA, PhD) are from Penn, which still has one of the top linguistics departments (as you pointed out :)).</p>

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<p>Does the Defense Language Institute actually offer lingustics, as opposed to practical instruction in languages?</p>

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<p>Thanks so much you guys. Any more schools that wouldn’t be so much of a reach…?</p>

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<p>

</p>

<p>Ah my mistake. I thought Chomsky’s relationship with MIT was as a student and professor, but it appears that it was just as a professor. Chomsky was the only one i guessed on. I probably should have wiki’d him, but oh well. At least I learned something today :p</p>

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<p>The list I offered above (#9) is based on the NRC 1995 ranking of graduate linguistics programs and on the more recent NRC rankings. </p>

<p>[NRC</a> Rankings in Each of 41 Areas](<a href=“NRC Rankings in Each of 41 Areas”>NRC Rankings in Each of 41 Areas)
[url=&lt;a href=“NRC Rankings Overview: Linguistics”&gt;NRC Rankings Overview: Linguistics]NRC</a> Rankings Overview: Linguistics - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education<a href=“The%20second%20ranking%20was%20done%20much%20more%20recently%20but%20is%20much%20harder%20to%20interpret;%20I%20tend%20to%20focus%20on%20the%20S-Rank.”>/url</a></p>

<p>These are graduate program rankings and only cover research universities. I culled them down to schools that also rank highly for undergraduate education (by USNWR - hey, it’s what we’ve got :(). The LACs I mentioned came up in extensive discussions on this subject a couple years back with a poster who wound up at Swarthmore.</p>

<p>Different research universities are likely to have different areas of strength (maybe Penn in sociolinguistics, Chicago in historical linguistics, Stanford/JHU/UMass-A in computational linguistics, etc.) However, unless you are a very unusual HS student who got a whole lot out of those URI courses, you probably are not ready to choose an undergraduate school based on those distinctions. I suggest you consider overall academic quality, “fit”, and affordability, as well as the course offerings in linguistics.</p>

<p>Universities that shouldn’t be too reachy for your stats:
Georgetown (the CAS should be somewhat less selective than the SFS)
USC
NYU
Boston U.
many state universities (Ohio State, etc.; possibly even UCLA, which seems to have a very strong linguistics program)</p>

<p>LACs with fairly extensive linguistics offerings, but less selective than Swarthmore/Pomona:
Macalester
Lawrence University</p>

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<p>UMASS Amherst has probably one of most respected linguistics departments in the nation. Many consider it the best. </p>

<p>As Rhode Island resident, you would get instate tuition for this major at UMASS.
<a href=“http://www.nebhe.org/wp-content/uploads/2013-14-TuitionBreak_for_RhodeIsland_Residents.pdf[/url]”>http://www.nebhe.org/wp-content/uploads/2013-14-TuitionBreak_for_RhodeIsland_Residents.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>McGill University and University of Toronto are also very strong.</p>

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<p>Agree with ClassicRockerDad</p>

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<p>Michigan appears to be pretty strong in Liguistics as well. No surprise really. Michigan is strong in just about every academic discipline that it offers.</p>

<p>[World’s</a> Best Universities in Linguistics; Top Linguistics Universities | US News](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-best-universities-rankings/best-universities-linguistics]World’s”>http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-best-universities-rankings/best-universities-linguistics)</p>

<p>22nd in the world for graduate studies according to USNews.</p>

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<p>Thanks everyone for the great tips :)</p>

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