<p>I am interested in biological and social anthropology, also, I make very good grades (top 3%). What colleges offer the best anthropology programs and have high academic success?</p>
<p>Are you a senior? Is geography a restriction? Give us an idea of those very good grades (SAT/GPA).</p>
<p>Academic success depends mostly on the student, not the school.</p>
<p>The ivies and near-ivies, plus Notre Dame and Rice. Some will be stronger in cultural or linguistic anthro than social or physical, but all will be very good.</p>
<p>Next question: can you afford and get into one of these? </p>
<p>Money is not an issue.</p>
<p>I’ve mentioned schools, except maybe ND and Rice, that are reaches for everyone. Would you consider public flagships for your match schools? Are you an international who feels the need to go only to schools well-known in your country or region of the world?</p>
<p>For social anthropology, virtually any great to excellent school with an anthropology department is likely to have a good solid anthropology department. There aren’t any undergraduate rankings of most departments, for a variety of (good) reasons. Some universities with the top-ranked (top 30 or so) anthropology departments, wrt research and doctoral education, are (1) Privates: Duke, Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, Wash U, Emory, Penn, NYU, Yale, UChicago, Cornell and (2) Publics: Penn State, Michigan, Wisconsin, several UCs, Stony Brook, Binghamton, UGA, UMass-Amherst, Michigan State, UIUC, Arizona State, UConn, UW-Seattle, among a couple others. Princeton, JHU and Syracuse are not far behind.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean that they are the best places to be undergrads - the professors might ignore undergrads, or most of the best ones may teach only graduate students, or maybe all of the undergrad classes are 600+ students or whatever. I would be willing to bet, though, that the quality of the anthro grad program is at least moderately correlated with the offerings on the undergrad level. I think you have to weigh it relative to the other factors about being an undergrad that you think are important, like social atmosphere, location, resources, etc.</p>
<p>Also, by definition the list doesn’t include any of the top small LACs. I’m sure that places like Williams, Bowdoin, Pomona, Amherst, et al. have excellent anthropology departments.</p>
<p>Physical anthropology is a bit different, of course. There was just another student who asked the other day about it, and IIRC some schools with good physical anthropology were Columbia (partly in their E3B department), Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, JHU, Tulane, Wash U, Vanderbilt, Boston U, Case Western, Michigan, Penn State, Rutgers, and several CUNYs (Lehman, Brooklyn, Queens, and Hunter). This is mostly based on their graduate programs’ reputations in physical anthropology; however, a good graduate program in the field is probably correlated with a good undergraduate program and at least indicates the presence of faculty that can teach classes in the field and also do research in the area.</p>
<p>I would also add McGill to the list.</p>