<p>My high schooler is most interested in history. Has anyone found sources that rank the strengths of different history departments?</p>
<p>There are no rankings for depts. at the undergrad level. Rankings for graduare programs give some idea of schools with better depts. but these omit small liberal arts colleges, many of which have excelent history depts. History is a core discipline in liberal arts; most selective colleges and universities will have a pretty good history dept. Don’t worry about rankings—focus more on finding a quality school that is good across multiple depts and that is a good fit (size, location, student/faculty interaction, cost, etc.).
Some possible indicators of the better depts. at the undergrad level is that they will offer a fair number of seminars for advanced majors with good opportunities for research. Also make sure there is sufficient breadth and depth in course offerings across the various geographic and chronological subfields in both lecture-discussion and seminar format courses. Also, is there a course in historography for majors. The structure of requirements for a history major is generally pretty similar across most depts: a survey course or two, a pre-modern course, at least one course distributed across American, European, and Non-Western areas, a subconcentration of 3-4 courses in a geographic or chronological or thematic area, a seminar or two, a course in historical method. For graduate work outside American or British history, languages are important. So someone is interested in Chinese history, for example, make sure the school offers coursework in Chinese. You also could look at whether the faculty publishes books and monographs. Also, are there good library resources.</p>
<p>Go off grad rankings.</p>
<p>[Rankings</a> - History - Graduate Schools - Education - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-history-schools/rankings]Rankings”>http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-history-schools/rankings)</p>
<p>While picking schools to apply to for my history degree I looked at the following things:
Profs - where they went to school, how many degrees did they hold, if they published any books, if they’ve won any teaching awards.
Recommendation - have your child talk to guidance counselors, and the history teachers at his/her school…they had to be a history student once too.
Course selection - Are there classes that interest him/her? Does the degree require him/her to take a lot of classes he/she’s not interested in?
For specific jobs like history teaching in a specific province/state you might want to see what the selections of courses is like for the areas that will help you be prepared for your future career. For example, all the schools I applied to had a lot of Canadian and American history classes, and only some European classes or Asian/ African/ other areas of the world. It would be cool to take an African history class or a class on Chinese Dynasties but it’s not exactly relevant to what I want to do (teach Canadian and American history)</p>
<p>Of course the regular things need to be looked into for the schools (like afford-ability and cost of residence/ meal plan) as well, but that’s what I looked at when it came to choosing a history program</p>