Hi!
I’m a current high school junior looking at colleges. I’m interested in politics, political science, and debate. Does anyone know how good UChicago is for undergrad political science? And does anyone know anything about their debate team? Thanks so much!
Chicago (along with HYP, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, WUSTL, Duke, Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA …) has one of the best political science departments in America. Compared to some of these other schools, Chicago seems to have a somewhat stronger focus on undergraduates, as well as a more holistic, interdisciplinary approach to social science education (one that emphasizes both pure political theory and modern quantitative methods.)
An important part of exposure to political science at Chicago is in the Core courses, which comprise up to about 1/3 of all your undergraduate coursework (https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/core). Core classes generally are limited to < 20 students, and are usually taught by professors not TAs (which is fairly unusual for introductory-/intermediate-level classes at a research university.) Chicago has among the smallest average class sizes of any top ~50 national university:
classes with <20 students … classes with >= 50 students … School
77% 5.7% Chicago
74.6% 8.9% Yale
74% 9.9% Harvard
71.8% 10.8% Princeton
70.2% 11.4% Stanford
59% 15.2% Berkeley
48.1% 17.6% Michigan
(source: USNWR; check Common Data Set files for more information about class size distributions, or online course schedules for enrollment limits in specific courses of interest.)
Of course, if you really want consistently small classes with maximum student-faculty engagement, you could pick a top LAC (like Bowdoin, Carleton, Swarthmore, or Williams). What you won’t find so often at a LAC are world-class research and scholars like these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pape
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_N._Rosenberg (Quantrell award winner *)
http://www.uchicago.edu/features/20120604_teaching_awards_cohen/ (Quantrell award winner *)
http://www.uchicago.edu/features/teaching_awards_charles_lipson/ (Quantrell award winner *)
Two international university ranking services place Chicago among the top 4 US universities for social science research.
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/faculty-rankings/social-sciences-and-management/2015#sorting=rank+region=+country=+faculty=+stars=false+search=
http://www.shanghairanking.com/FieldSOC2012.html
Again, what really distinguishes Chicago is not only research excellence but also its strong undergraduate focus. The effects of that combination play out in the high percentage of Chicago alumni who go on to earn PhDs in social science disciplines. From 2005-2014, Chicago ranked 7th in the percentage of college alumni who went on to earn social science PhDs. When you adjust for undergraduate population size, it ranks 2nd among research university colleges (with 273 alumni social science PhDs, compared to #1 Harvard’s 479).
(Source: https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/webcaspar/)
The effects also show up in the impact of notable alumni, such as political commentator David Brooks (1983), former presidential advisor David Axelrod (1977), current presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (1964), former Attorneys General Robert Bork (1948) and Edward Levy (1932), and former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens (1941). These alumni exemplify a combination of intellectual depth and integrity across a rather wide span of different political views. You can be a Trotskyist at the University of Chicago … or, you can be a Neoconservative. University of Chicago people have been shaping political thought across the spectrum for many decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss
Chicago people also have been pushing the envelope in social science research methods and data mining for a long time now.
http://www.norc.org/Pages/default.aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics
So, in summary:
for undergraduate political science, UChicago is very good.
Whether it’s the right fit for you is another question.
There are many other schools with excellent PS departments, good financial aid, and interesting locations.
Georgetown, Amherst, Harvard, and Michigan all put a somewhat different spin on what it means to be “good”.
Great response tk. I took classes with Mearsheimer, Pape, and Lipson - they were awesome. Their classes are huge though (100+) due to their popularity. Would still recommend.
Although he’s not a political scientist, any discussion of politics at UChicago’s would be incomplete without mentioning that it’s the school that gave us Milton Friedman and the university’s namesake “school” of economics. There are others who’ve had a greater influence on economic policy in the US and the political discourse surrounding it, but you can count these men on the fingers of one hand.
Debate is mostly flay, if you did flow policy, you won’t enjoy it, but otherwise it is pretty good.