US News ranking has it at around 40th? What are those rankings based off of?
Trying clicking on the link to “methodology” at the top of the PS ranking page.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articles/2014/03/10/methodology-best-social-sciences-and-humanities-schools-rankings
That is a ranking of graduate program strength, by the way.
As @tk21769 said, it’s a ranking of graduate programs. The reasons for that ranking are numerous. Here’s my take (cross-posted from elsewhere):
With the PhD rankings, one really must bear in mind that this is a survey of academics at universities. Said academics are very strongly biased in favor of academia and self-propogation. IR as a field may be a bit better in this regard than most, but it is still a strong bias. What I mean by this is that, generally speaking, academics in the humanities and social sciences see only one purpose to doctoral studies: the creation of future generations of academics (who will, preferably, go on to spread the theories and philosophies of their teachers). It’s pretty much U.S. tenure-track job or bust, the most prestigious the better. Working at RAND or a think tank or in government or at the University of Lisbon or something is not considered worthy.
Georgetown, by contrast, accepts and graduates a huge (relatively speaking) proportion of PhDs who have no intention of becoming academics. They are military officers, career civil servants, university administrative lifers trying to get a PhD in order to break through many of the glass ceilings that exist in academia for non-PhDs, internationals of various stripes, etc. etc.
As a result, Georgetown’s program is not regarded as highly, irrespective of the quality of the instruction, the dissertations, the faculty’s research output, or the learning outcomes.
Now, there’s various reasons why the Georgetown Government PhD program has not been smashingly successful at placement of those who do want to pursue academia. Money has a lot to do with it: for a long time, the funding for doctoral candidates did not materialize as successfully as it did at more deep-pocketed institutions (if you’re gunning for a top-tier tenure-track position, 999 times out of 1,000 you’re getting your PhD for free and getting a stipend - that’s just how the system works). More recently, the fact that Georgetown has resisted the prevailing tide of turning the discipline into a purely quantitative, number-centric enterprise (note that the program is still called Government, NOT political science) has also had a major impact.
Long story short: there’s a price to one’s reputation to be paid for not going along with everyone else.
Interesting points. There’s an intriguing article in Slate this week exploring the fact that a relatively small percentage of universities produce a large percentage of tenured professors.