Northwestern vs Washu in St. Louis

@warblersrule, any input?

@PurpleTitan who is warblersrule??

Someone who teaches who may know something about linguistics.

@warblersrule you have been summoned

@dfbdfb has been summoned too. Also a linguistics professor.

Little knowledge of linguistics but can offer advice about grad school applications.

Academics and GRE’s must pass muster, but first and foremost, proving your research creds is critical to top line PhD programs. For a relatively niche major like linguistics, having the potential to work with a known entity in the field and have him/her make use of personal contacts to support letters of rec can be the difference between a thumbs up or down.

Micro parsing where you think you’ll score a higher GPA is a fool’s errand. Both schools will serve you well. Go where you think you’ll be happiest socially and will be best challenged/supported academically.

Either school’s plenty excellent as an undergrad option for linguistics, if you’re looking ahead to a PhD. Northwestern has a fuller linguistics department in terms of the department itself, but WUSTL supplements their department with faculty in other departments who are actually really misplaced linguists (e.g., John Baugh, who’s technically in the anthropology department). If this were back when I was in grad school I’d probably say to go with Northwestern, but WUSTL has made some excellent linguistics hires over the past several years, so there are more possibilities there for undergrad research and such than there used to be.

Also: Do you know yet whether you’re interested in theoretical linguistics, or some other part of the field? Northwestern’s program is straight-up theoretical, while WUSTL’s has a core in the theoretical subfields but (being more interdisciplinary in nature) also allows you to branch out a bit. Of course, even if you’re interested in, say sociolinguistics, you can get into that from a program like Northwestern’s (as I did—my undergrad was at Maryland, which was then even more theoretically oriented than it is now, and I’m now a sociolinguist).

That said, as long as there’s a linguistics major, I wouldn’t worry too much about the “quality” of the undergrad program (as many on CC would define it). I put “quality” in scare-quotes for a reason—I mean, some really, really interesting linguistics research is coming out of places people on CC generally turn their noses up at like, say, the College of Charleston or UNC-Charlotte or the University of South Florida, but most (MIT may be one of a handful of exceptions to this) high-end linguistics graduate programs will happily take people from programs like those, as long as they’ve had undergraduate research experiences.

Northwestern has a slight reputational edge in academia: tip-top Engineering, Econ, Journalism and many other highly ranked programs are probably why.

That said, it’s undergrad, which is more about personal fit, both academic and otherwise. Both schools are more than adequate for your purposes – you will not exhaust their teaching resources.

@dfbdfb I’m not positive because I’ve obviously never taken a linguistics course before, but theoretical linguistics seems more interesting to me, from the small amount of reading I’ve done.