<p>Hey guys, I was accepted to American, and it looks like a great school. But recently I’ve been looking at rankings, mostly international, and American is pretty low on them. Not that I’m one to obsess over rankings, but I was curious as to why, when it seems like it has what it takes to be a good choice for those majors?</p>
<p>I’m an SIS student so I can speak from the SIS perspective, but not so much on the SPA perspective. </p>
<p>Firstly, what rankings are you looking at? Foreign Policy Magazine ranks AU SIS #8 and #10 in graduate and undergraduate programs and that is a highly authoritative ranking because it was a part of the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey specifically focused on the subject of IR. </p>
<p>I noticed you wrote international rankings… If you’re looking at rankings like QS World Rankings they rely heavily on faculty citations in which schools like Harvard and LSE with the most renowned scholars are most cited. Also, the field of international relations is interdisciplinary and therefore, for example, QS World Rankings doesn’t even have a strict ‘international relations’ category for rankings which means that they add up faculty citations in political science along with IR… and there’s no way AU (or a whole bunch of amazing schools) could compete with schools like Harvard’s Kennedy School in number of citations. US News does the same thing. </p>
<p>Just some thoughts. </p>
<p>Since I can’t speak on the SPA side, here are the SPA rankings from AU’s website:</p>
<p>SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS
U.S. News & World Report America’s Best Graduate Schools (2013)</p>
<h1>8 Top Public Management/Public Administration Program</h1>
<h1>12 Top Schools: Public Affairs</h1>
<h1>24 Top Public Finance and Budgeting Program</h1>
<h1>28 Top Public Policy Program</h1>
<p>Thank you for your reply, you made lots of valid points. I was looking at QS and others that I guess do focus mostly on citations.
Since you’re an SIS student, what would you say the classes, professors, school as a whole are like? Is AU worthy of the rankings that Foreign Policy Magazine gives it?</p>
<p>Glad I can help. Here’s what I’ve gathered about the field of IR and social sciences rankings: IR, as a discipline that was birthed in the US shortly after World War I, is interdisciplinary. As a field, IR intersected with other disciplines like political science, anthropology, economics, area studies, and more. In my opinion, rankings failed to recognize IR as its own individual discipline and continues to place it under a broad category with political science all too often. On the other hand, IR as a discipline created its own regimes that scholars adhered to for academic purposes that did too little to be linked as a mainstream discipline. Tangent: The Association of Professional Schools of International Relations (APSIA) was barely formed in 1989 with 34 schools to date and most universities don’t offer IR as a major. Anyhow, these rankings take into consideration other factors, but faculty citations is just one of the categories AU really can’t compete at against top tier schools who have had long histories and well established social sciences programs. In case you didn’t know, SIS, as a school of international relations was formed in the 1940s under Eisenhower so we have a lot of catching up to do.</p>
<p>On the other hand, AU is focusing heavily on research in the past few years and their [tenured</a> and tenure-track faculty](<a href=“http://www.american.edu/sis/faculty/]tenured”>Faculty | School of International Service | American University, Washington, DC) are much better than when I first entered AU as a freshman. I’m sure you know I have to be a bit biased here as an AU student, but I think AU does earn its spot as a top tier international relations school. I don’t know how to describe it, but AU, as a whole, is definitely a teaching-oriented school that stresses class participation and small class sizes. I love that, but some students don’t and would much rather prefer to go to a large school where they can miss class sometimes. From my experiences here, AU has stressed interdisciplinary knowledge and critical thinking – and I think that’s key to a great undergraduate education. If you look at the classes and degrees offered under SIS, you’ll find that AU is a different type of IR school focusing on peace and conflict res., environmental politics, sustainability, development, and US foreign policy/national security as key focuses. I think other IR schools are more focused on area studies and security studies compared to AU. Since I intern at Johns Hopkins SAIS, the #2 ranked IR program for Masters programs according to FP, I have some particular thoughts on AU’s graduate programs which aren’t so rosy, but I think AU is a great place to receive an undergraduate degree. </p>
<p>I could go on, but the best way I can describe AU at this point is that it is constantly changing (at a rapid pace, more than other schools). When I entered as a freshman in 2011 the new School of International Service building was just erected and now they are revamping the McKinley building to house the School of Communication. Every single school within the university has changed deans that are more qualified and better equipped to advance their respective schools. I can go on and on… After looking at [url=<a href=“http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/14/does_the_academy_matter_do_policymakers_listen_should_you_get_a_phd_and_where_ar]this[/url”>http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/14/does_the_academy_matter_do_policymakers_listen_should_you_get_a_phd_and_where_ar]this[/url</a>] article to see SIS Dean Goldgeier’s thoughts on IR academia, I think AU is headed in the right direction. </p>