Hi, I’m currently going into my sophomore year of high school, and I’m looking into what colleges I want to apply to. I’m interested in political science and potentially international relations, and plan on being a very competitive applicant (1500+ SAT, 4.4+ GPA, plenty of meaningful extracurriculars). My current top schools are Yale, Georgetown SFS, and UChicago, and Stanford. What are some good safety or match schools that I should look into? Generally, I would be looking for a school on the smaller side (i.e. not having like 30k students) with a strong political science program. Also if there was potentially an honors program that I could be accepted into that would definitely be a plus. In general, I’m open to most schools, and I just want some names and a bit about each school so I could look into them further. Thanks for the advice guys!
Going into sophomore year = just finished grade 9. You have hypothetical stats & ECs. You won’t be applying for another 2.5 years. You are putting the cart well and truly ahead of the horse! So, go ahead and look at different programs, but don’t get too set on any of them yet. You will change a lot over the next 2 years- leave yourself room to evolve.
The usual suspects for IR include SFS, JHU, Tufts, W&M, GWU, Princeton, AU, Columbia/Barnard, UMi, OSU, some of the UCs, etc - but irl, pretty much any academically strong school is going to have a strong PoliSci/IR department- it is a long standing fave with students.
One crucial consideration: PoliSci & IR don’t pay well right out of college, unpaid/poorly paid internships are part of the process, and down the road to get the really good jobs will require grad school (3-5 years after finishing college). Those programs are expensive, with limited financial aid.
No matter where you go to college, the biggest variable will be how much you maximize internships, study away & language mastery options- which will be abundant almost everywhere. Avoiding debt is seriously important: an IR degree from your in-state flagship and no debt will set you up better than a fancy name and debt, because you will be able to take internships and starter opportunities without having to worry about servicing debt. Have the money talk with your parents now, and check out the NPCs. If they can and will pay full freight- happy days! but if not, be prepared to re-think your list.
This is from MIT admissions, but it applies to any student with academic ambitions:
University of Denver immediately popped into my head for international relations. I have no idea how hard it is to get into, though.
Thanks, it looks like a cool school. It has an acceptance rate of around 60%, so it’s definitely in the safety range.
for matches, think of colleges like GWU, safeties are going to be your instate public, so if even it’s over 30K, you may have to consider them, especially for affordability.
What is your home state?
These are the top 20 undergraduate programs in International Relations, according to a poll of 1,541 IR professors across the US that was conducted by Foreign Policy magazine in 2018.
The study clearly has a bias toward Virginia / DC and the east coast, which stands to reason given that the co-author of the study was faculty from William & Mary, which isn’t known as a powerhouse in IR:
Top 6: Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown SFS, Columbia, Yale, Chicago
Next 14
- George Washington U., American U.
- UC—Berkeley, UC—San Diego
- Dartmouth
- Tufts University
- Michigan
- Johns Hopkins
- College of William & Mary (nb. the likely bias in the study)
- MIT
- Cornell
- OHIO STATE
- UPenn
The obvious conclusion is that you should give Ohio State a close look.
GWU and American U are safeties but probably overpriced, and without any real excellence outside of politics. They’re better for grad school, to be honest.
Anyone who knows IR knows that Ohio State’s faculty is world-class, and includes these all-stars, each of them a leader in his or her specialization:
- Randall Schweller (Realism- arguably the leading scholar in the field)
- Alex Wendt (Constructivism - without question the leader int he field; he practically founded the discipline)
- Jennifer Mitzen
- Chris Gelpi
- Bear Braumoeller
- Lawrence Baum and Charles Smith for ConLaw
- Eric MacGilvray for Political Philosophy
- Geoffrey Parker, Col. Peter Mansoor, and Mark Grimsley for Military History
- Peter Hahn and Jennifer Siegel for Diplomatic History
Frankly, you’d get better training at OSU than you would at nearly any school on the list - certainly better than at Yale or Princeton these days.
TOSU + Honors college is a great choice (honors would make it a match not a safety).
Macalester, Dickinson, Ole Miss+Sally Barskdale Honors+ Croft Institute(matches) or Kalamazoo (safety), are worth a look.
Critical language flagships should be on your list.
Always plan to apply to your state’s honors colleges.
Before that :
Run the npc and show the results to your parents before you get attached to any school.
Develop proficiency (AP+) in a European language and start (through community college or community education) on a critical language. If offered at your school, make sure to have all 3 AP history courses as well as, if possible, AP Comp Gov in addition to AP US Gov. Try to join Model UN or Debate.
Even if we accept the OPs predictions of their future stats & ECs, GWU & AU are not safeties unless they are affordable- and for PS/IR imo that means little/no debt. Also, AU is known to not like being considered a safety, and explicitly considers ‘interest’ as a ‘very important’ metric.
I’m standing over post #1: you can get a great PS/IR degree from most colleges- and the key variable will be what you do with the opportunities that exist.
But if we are going to get into the weeds of specific programs, there are differences between them that the OP could be looking into. Completely agree that OSU has a strong program- especially in theory and theory development- but the program is more like JHU than (say) SFS, which itself is more like Columbia than (say) Tufts.etc. GWU’s ace is their combination of access and scheduling that makes in-term internships a realistic option: the motivated PS/IR GWU students I know have brand-name internships year round.
And completely agree with @MYOS1634 about getting some serious language skills going.
I’m not sure the Honors Program is helpful or very meaningful, but others may differ.
Regardless, Ohio State’s international relations strength is in the area of security ie understanding the causes of war. The only other program that comes close in this area is Columbia’s.
MIT, Harvard, Dartmouth and Stanford are also strong in this area, but anyone’s chances of being accepted to those schools without a hook are next to zero.
Ohio State however has another huge advantage. TOSU deepens and supplements their IR strength with an extensive number of courses in history that deal with the causes, conduct and consequences of war. In this area, almost all of the top 50 or so research universities have completely disbanded their military history faculty.
Yale hired one tenure track prof recently, given that Gaddis and Kennedy are close to retirement, but there are simply no other professors outside of Ohio State, Texas A&M, Kansas and a couple of other Tier One research universities who even offer courses in WWII any more - let alone the Peloponnesian War. At those Top 20 IR Schools, you’d be hard-pressed to find even a single course at our best universities that focuses on the causes, conduct and consequences of the two world wars. Shocking but true.
OTOH, if the OP’s interest inclines more toward the economic aspects of international relations, then UC San Diego and U Minnesota - assuming it’s not set on fire in the next few years - would be good options.
UCSD is not a safety for anyone, in-state or otherwise; Minnesota might be a safety for the OP.
Nb. the difficulty of admission is NOT correlated with the depth or quality of the school’s IR offerings. TOSU is your best bet, by far.
Another factor is the particular geographic region that interests you. Different schools will have different strengths in language programs and Area Studies: some will be stronger in Arabic & Middle Eastern studies, others in China and East Asia, still others in Russian and Russian and East European security studies, others in Africa or Southeast Asia.
An objective list can be found in the federal FLAS program’s National Resource Centers (NRCs), a list of centers of excellence in language instruction and area studies that have received significant research dollars from the Dept of Defense.
Those universities are also worth looking into and may contain some hidden gems, especially Indiana U, U. Pittsburgh and U. of Washington.
For example, if you want to focus on Russia, then any of these three midwestern flagships would be excellent choices:
- INDIANA U.
- U. WISCONSIN
- OHIO STATE
If you’re keen on China and East Asian Studies, then of course many of the west coast flagships are excellent choices, including of course UCLA and UCB as well as U. WASHINGTON and U. of UTAH.
Note that for the latest round of grants to NRCs, those universities with the most areas of excellence are actually INDIANA U., U. ILLINOIS, and U. WISCONSIN, which have received grants across four different areas. U. PITTSBURGH is also extremely strong in multiple areas, including Latin American Studies.
“At those Top 20 IR Schools, you’d be hard-pressed to find even a single course at our best universities that focuses on the causes, conduct and consequences of the two world wars. Shocking but true.”
It’s not shocking, because guess what, it’s not true. Here are four Stanford’s courses on that subject:
The Changing Face of War: Introduction to Military History.
The Ending of World War I: Three Perspectives.
The Great War
America as a World Power: U.S. Foreign Relations, 1914 to Present.
Berkeley has entire course just on World War II.
“I would be looking for a school on the smaller side (i.e. not having like 30k students)”
Despite all the effusive praise for OSU, they have 48K undergrads, not really a small side college.
Thanks for the replies guys! To give a bit more information that some of the responses were looking for, I’m student in California (SF Bay Area) and I’m currently taking Chinese, although I don’t plan to continue that for college. In IR, my area of focus would likely be the Middle East and, in particular, Israel (I’m Jewish so Israel has a lot of significance to me). I want to learn Hebrew so the school would have to offer that.
Ohio State definitely is a school that I didn’t know had a good IR and polisci program, and I’ll look into it. It definitely is significantly larger than I would like and it’s location isn’t ideal to me, so it has some downsides.
Money shouldn’t be an issue for me for applying, although of course my parents would prefer not spending 70k per year.
GWU does offer a lot of courses about the middle east and does have Hebrew as one of the languages. If you have decent stats they will provide some merit aid, but still costly. Once we have a way out of this pandemic and you can visit, I would suggest a trip to the east coast to see. GWU is also in the heart of DC, versus American , which is still in the city but not in the heart.
thelonius,
True that Stanford has one teacher who specializes in Military History – except that she’s not a tenure-track professor, or even a professor at all. Gil-Li Vardi is listed by Stanford as a “Lecturer”, the equivalent of a post-doc.
(Nice try, though.)
zbsarver,
In your search for a safety school you’ll have to make some trade-offs between:
a) preferred size,
b) academic prestige,
c) quality of the IR/poli sci program, and
d) robust offerings in Hebrew and middle eastern studies.
American U. comes the closest to fulfilling all the above criteria. Good luck!
If OP is a CA resident, then for sure than UC or CSU should be safety both wrt admissions and affordability.
Assuming you’re in-state, UC Berkeley and UCSD are excellent options.
If you keep your grades up, you have a good shot at both UCB and UC San Diego, each of which is strong in IR and has excellent programs in Jewish Studies as well as Hebrew.
They’re not safeties; however, at the UC website, “Admissions By Source School,” you can see annual aggregate data going back 25 years for number of students who applied and how many were admitted, as well as the average weighted GPAs (covering 10th and 11th grade) for admitted students and applicants, from your high school for each UC applied to. (It’s also sorted by ethnicity.) So you know what weighted GPA to shoot for in order to have an excellent chance at getting into each UC.
Berkeley especially has made enormous strides in its Jewish programs over the last decade and has seemed to avoid much of the anti-Jewish harassment that from time to time afflicts other elite campuses.
Search for an article titled “Jewish Progress Taking Place at UC Berkeley,” by Ron E. Hassner, UCB’s Professor of Israel Studies, for a good survey of all the positive things happening now at and around the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies.
Yeah, I think it’s likely that I’ll end up going to UCB (and if not there another UC), especially given that they accept around 20 kids from my high school each year, and I should be in the range of the top 20 applicants. I kinda want to go out of state though, so that’s why I’m asking for some schools that are feasible to get into lol, instead of Yale, Georegetown, and UChicago which are my top 3
I’ve heard good things about GWU and AU, although I’m not too excited about them for some reason. It very well could be just my perception of them as the safety schools that’s making me think that way though. I do know I should defenitely seriously look into the two more.
If you would consider an LAC, I suggest you take a look at Denison University’s Richard G. Lugar Program in Politics and Public Service. The Program, which is highly-regarded, has two tracks, one of which focuses on foreign policy and international affairs. Denison has some generous merit scholarships, which could be helpful if you are going on to graduate school.