I couldn’t find rankings online, and my friend told me that US News is really unreliable in this regard. I was just wondering which schools have the best political science and psychology majors?
“US News is really unreliable in this regard”
US News does not rate undergraduate programs in these fields in any capacity.
Those are both social sciences, so you could use USNWR to see what percentage of students major in social sciences to try to get a feel for its notoriety at a college, though that’s far from concrete.
For political science, schools in large urban areas are more likely to have great internship opportunities, especially schools in Washington D.C. There’s a nice spectrum of schools in the nation’s capital that are worth looking at:
Georgetown, George Washington, American, Howard
@DetroitLeper What you said is not true at all.
@mooseoverlord St. Anselm is worth a look. The NH State Institute of Politics is located there. It is known nationally in PS.
TurnerR, what makes you think DetroitLeper’s comment “is not true at all.” DC is a particularly good place for internships year round and its schools are magnets for students interested in poly sci, international relations, public policy, media mgt, social justice, etc…And the schools mentioned are good ones - but don’t forget UMD and Catholic.
As for using USNWR, that’s dicier. I suggest you try googling ‘top undergraduate programs in x’ and you’ll get all kinds of listings from various sources using a variety of selection criteria. Do some cross-referencing, look for schools that have characteristics that meet your criteria for size, location, price, etc…, and then do the ‘deep dive’ where you check out each school’s course catalog to see what they offer, how many faculty they have, whether faculty research interests align with your interests. Finally, go to the Common Data Set for each school (google it) and scroll down to section C to check how your stats align with those of the admitted students so you can ‘chance’ yourself.
Time-consuming? You bet. That’s why you start this process no later than the summer before your senior year.
Off the top of my head and based on what my friends in debate (poli sci) have applied to:
The majority of the Ivies
U Chicago
Georgetown
George Mason
George Washington
Washington U. in St. Louis
Northwestern
Georgetown would probably be your #1 goal for her, the School for Foreign Service is well known and produces some of the most talented people I know.
I’m sure there’s countless schools that should be included with those I’ve listed, by no means let this be indicative of a school’s worth; there’s pros and cons to every single one of them.
For psychology, you can examine to what extent potential schools of interest offer courses in the major branches of contemporary psychology: clinical, cognitive, developmental, educational, personality, physiological, sensory and social. A good program will have both range and depth. If you are interested in becoming a clinician, you should look for colleges that offer the opportunity for a field placement at a local mental health care facility as part of their undergraduate program.
For political science, schools located in Washington can of course be good. Nonetheless, colleges offering semester-long programs in Washington can conceivably offer a competitive – and possibly more concentrated – experience in the Nation’s capital.
Michigan for both.
@n’s mom Students generally do internships in the summer so location of their school is not that important. Besides, political centers are everywhere, namely state capitols and important primary states.
I think if you add up all the internships in political science each year a minority would be in DC.
There are no undergraduate rankings in the traditional disciplines. All the rankings you will see are based on the quality of graduate programs. That being said, a strong graduate program usually indicates that the department has a strong and large faculty, a deep and broad curriculum and undergraduate courses to choose from, research opportunities for undergraduate students, a healthy flow of funding coming into the department etc…Only keep in mind that there are many excellent departments that don’t rank as high but still offer equally good undergraduate education in those fields.
Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Michigan, Yale, Cal, Columbia, MIT, Duke Chicago, UCSD, UCLA, UNC-Chapel Hill and WUSTL are considered the best political science departments in the country. Half of them are not located in major cities, and none of them are located within 150 miles of Washington DC.
Other good departments…also located far from DC.
Cornell University
Indiana University-Bloomington
New York University
Northwestern University
Ohio State University
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
University of Rochester
University of Wisconsin-Madison
None of the DC schools has a top rated Political Science department. They are exceptional in International Relations though. If the OP wishes to study diplomacy, foreign service or international relations, Georgetown, GW and AU are truly exceptional. For those interested in a more traditional Political Science degree, being in Washington DC is not required. As Turner aptly and accurately points out, students at all the top Political Science departments mentioned above can secure valuable internships in DC over summer.
All of the universities listed above also happen to have excellent psychology departments.
“None of the top DC schools has a top rated political science department” (#9)
Rated by whom?
“[These schools] are considered [to have] the best political science departments in the country.” (#9)
Again, by whom? And on what level?
If undergraduate programs are not rated, then they are simply . . . not rated. And Georgetown and GW would be excellent for government/political science, as would a couple of other larger schools not mentioned at all above such as Notre Dame or Villanova. Purely undergraduate focused colleges such as Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Carleton, Claremont McKenna, Davidson, Hamilton, Swarthmore and Vassar would also be conspicuously disregarded in terms of their strength in government/political science by a method of evaluation that presumably relies on an analysis of graduate departments only.
Psychology and political science are some of the most popular liberal arts majors by far, and any good school is going to be at least decent in both. The same goes for other generic programs like biology, English, history, and so on. If you don’t apply for a PhD – which odds are you won’t – you should be less concerned with finding the absolute best programs and more concerned with finding an overall good fit.
I recommend starting with other factors (affordability, selectivity, location/setting, size, etc.) and then narrowing down based on offerings in psych and poli sci. Try the College Search tool here on CC.
“I think if you add up all the internships in political science each year a minority would be in DC.”
But if you look at the concentration of opportunities year round - the aggregate number of internships in DC in political science/advocacy - I doubt there is anywhere better in the entire country. And summer is when students who live outside of the DC area do their internships (often in DC). Those who are studying in DC often are involved year round. That’s part of what makes it such a vibrant and dynamic place for people with those interests.
That doesn’t mean internships don’t exist elsewhere in the country - they are indeed available everywhere. But what’s special in DC is that there are so many people with a shared interest in how the political process works, such varies opportunities, and so many resources for people who want to learn about the process by actively participating all year round.
“If undergraduate programs are not rated, then they are simply . . . not rated.”
merc81, graduate school rankings are a legitimate indictor of the quality of the department, regardless of the level. As you point out, LACs and universities with low research activity may offer absolutely stellar undergraduate instruction in several disciplines at the undergraduate level, and that is not in dispute. But I think it is fair to say that if department is strong at the graduate level, it is also going to be strong at the undergraduate level. Why wouldn’t be? You will essentially have the same faculty teaching the same material (albeit watered down and less statistical) in the same facilities.
The issue I have with lumping International Relations with Political Science is that IR is merely a sub-speciality of Political Science. As I said above, if the OP wishes to study IR, which he/she did not specify, then the DC schools are great. But if she/he wishes to focus on the broader spectrum of Political Science sub-specialities, they may not be as good as other departments around the nation. My point is, why limit yourself to just one city when there are many other excellent programs around the nation?
“Rated by whom? And on what level?”
Take your pick. Any ranking of Political Science or Psychology departments will look roughly the same. The two main sources of US programs and departments that I can think of are US News graduate school rankings and the National Research Council.
Political science is not the same as politics, and there are lots of different ways to study systems of government and political behavior - you don’t need to be anywhere near DC nor do you have to do a summer or semester in DC. For one thing, every single state in the U.S. has a state capital where government business is done (and frankly, it would be easier to get an internship there than in DC). There’s also international and comparative politics, which may involve studying or interning abroad. Moreover, although DC is the capital there’s lots of business of state done elsewhere. For example, I did an accidental search for “consulate” (I meant to search for “consulate” plus…something, but I hadn’t figured it out yet when I hit enter) and found that there are consulates for Canada, Japan, and Sweden right here in the greater Seattle area.
You would think so, but you might not be right.
Will you have the same faculty teaching the same material? Haha, maybe, but probably not. Faculty at large prestigious research universities with top psychology departments (and similar is true in political science) are not hired to teach. They are hired to do research and rake in grant dollars for the university. In fact, those research dollars allow them to “buy out” teaching time - i.e., the standard load may be a 2/2 (two classes a semester), but having a big grant may allow them to buy their time down to a 1/0 (one class in the fall). The buying out that they do is almost always undergraduate courses. Plus, senior professors always get better choices of coursework, and most usually they choose graduate seminars - because they are less time-consuming to teach and because grad students can substantially contribute to their research or book projects. So those famous cutting-edge researchers you hear about 1) may not be teaching at all; 2) if they are teaching, may only be teaching graduate seminars; and 3) if they do teach undergrad classes, may only teach them once every other year or something.
Instead, these departments hire lecturers and adjunct professors to teach the undergrads (with all that sweet sweet grant money the Bigwig brought in). In a couple of psychology departments I am actually familiar with, that is the case. The freshman and sophomore psychology classes are taught by full-time lecturers and adjunct professors who are hired explicitly for that purpose. The junior-level classes are taught by a mix of junior professors and some adjuncts. Some senior-level seminars are taught by more mid-ranked professors in the department. I know lots of professors who actively avoid teaching undergrads, if they can, because it’s a time suck. They don’t get rewarded for it. Distinguished Professor Bigwig, who discovered sliced bread in 1978 and has been explicating its usefulness since then to much acclaim, is not teaching Intro to Psychology for Majors.
And “the same material.” Haha. Maybe. Not likely. Not always. Some professors do research in pretty advanced areas that aren’t easy to water down for undergrads, and some simply don’t want to. One department I am familiar with does not offer the breadth of coursework for its undergrads that it does for grad students. There are definitely shortages in some areas. (Interestingly enough, a nearby liberal arts college offers a greater breadth of classes, and they are of course smaller and more intimate).
Some facilities matter and others don’t, but the ones programs are ranked on may not matter to undergrads. Why would an undergrad care if the department has its own fMRI scanner or state-of-the-art bat laboratories? You care about study spaces that aren’t exclusive to the doctoral students, libraries with holdings across fields to help you in your distributional requirements (and helpful librarians who teach you the magic of Zotero) and not just ones with esoteric psychology journals you won’t really use, and high-tech classrooms so you can hear the lecturer in your 300-person intro psychology class. One LAC I’m familiar with has an empirical reasoning laboratory, which exists to help students doing research projects with the analysis part of their project. They can go and get FREE help planning their project from beginning to end, including help with the statistical analyses, as well as with statistics homework. That kind of thing is not included in the rankings of graduate programs because they’re irrelevant to doctoral students.
That’s why I always say that graduate departmental rankings are not necessarily a good indicator of the quality of the undergraduate education in a specific place. The things that are directly relevant to a person looking for a good PhD program are not necessarily relevant or important to a person looking for a good undergrad department. There’s also the fact that you’ll only take about 1/3 of your classes in your major anyway, so you want to pick a school that’s good holistically.
Of course, I’m not saying that these places are not good places for undergrads to study psychology or political science - they might be! I’m just saying don’t rely on graduate rankings to help you make that decision.