The Top Ten International Relations Undergraduate Programs

Where to start your fast-track to running the world.

JAN/FEB 2012

2. Princeton University
Student-faculty ratio:
6:1
Tuition:
$37,000
Website:
  http://wws.princeton.edu
Campus international relations organization:
International Relations Council

Why go to Princeton? President Woodrow Wilson's convictions were forged in its halls, and the university's tradition of impacting how the United States approaches foreign policy is carried on today by former Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter. It features a range of other outstanding thinkers on foreign policy, from G. John Ikenberry to former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer. Bonus points: The hospital that appears in the opening credits of the hit TV show "House, M.D." is actually Princeton's University Medical Center.

 

Methodology: The authors are researchers with the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project at the College of William and Mary. The fourth wave of the TRIP survey explores the views of international relations (IR) faculty from every four-year college and university in the United States, as identified by U.S. News & World Report, for their views on various international issues. The results include the responses of 1,582 faculty members, representing more than 40 percent of IR scholars in the United States, collected between August and November 2011. The parallel survey of practitioners surveyed 244 current and former policymakers who served from 1989 to 2008 in national security decision-making roles at the level of assistant secretary, director, and designated policymaking groups within several U.S. government agencies.You can find complete results from the survey of U.S. IR scholars here.

TWETTACH

4:04 AM ET

January 3, 2012

Correction

The most generally agreed upon and only widely-followed rankings place Yale's Model UN team 4th, rather than 1st as this article states. Yale has an excellent MUN team and many great, smart kids- however, the arbitrary, descriptive analysis of an academic survey that this article offers could use some work.

http://bestdelegate.com/fall-2011-college-model-un-rankings-top-1-5/

 

BISMARCKIANREALIST

9:12 AM ET

January 3, 2012

How conceited are Georgetown

How conceited are Georgetown students that they can't accept the fact that they are not ranked as highly in this as they want themselves to believe?

Model UN rankings do not mean anything as this is a measurement of the academic side of the school, not a silly model UN ranking. You know...that's why you go to a certain school: to learn from distinguished faculty in the field of International Relations, not compete in boring General Assemblies or pretend to be a general in crisis simulations. So take a chill pill and go back to your ivory tower on the hill, secluded from the rest of DC.

 

TWETTACH

10:50 AM ET

January 3, 2012

Thank you Bismarkianrealist

Thank you Bismarkianrealist for your comment. The point that I was trying to make was that qualitative descriptions of a school's MUN program do not serve to enhance or explain an academic survey. This statement wasn't meant to be about MUN rankings, which are controversial in themselves, or the comparative quality of any specific school. It was about the odd, uncited application of them as an explanation for the ranking of a school's academic IR program. My apologies for the misunderstanding- I can see how my previous statement led you to believe I was making a different, even more trivial argument.

Now, back to the ivory tower.

 

TWETTACH

4:10 AM ET

January 3, 2012

Correction

The campus international relations organization at GU is the Georgetown International Relations Club, rather than the Georgetown International Relations Council as stated above.

 

ACCIDENTALGUERRILLA

10:55 AM ET

January 3, 2012

American University

So there's no mention of American's brand new School of International Service building? Nor a mention that frequent FP contributor James Goldgeier is the new Dean? There are also a number of well-known experts that are faculty at SIS including Amitav Acharya and David Bosco (another FP contributor). There are probably more in the Peace and Conflict Resolution program, but that's a no-go zone for me.

Moreover, AU's new International Security program far exceeds the UG equivalents at GWU and Georgetown. Our study of violence, war and conflict areas are infinitely more dense than at GW, in particular. As for Georgetown, people are obsessed with its reputation, but its really becoming the lesser school in DC.

There is no shortage of distinguished Faculty at AU and while its "active" student body is certainly a perk, the academic rigor and ongoing program development outweigh SIS' large hipster population camping at K Street.

Obviously I went to AU, but I really disagree with the rankings.

Here's how it should have gone:

1. Woody Woo
2. Kennedy School
3. Stanford
4. SFS
5. Columbia
6. AU and GW (tie - let's be honest, everyone knows this is true)
7. Chicago
8. Tufts
9. Korbel
10. Syracuse

Yale and Dartmouth on the list? Please.

Rank Graduate Programs, that's more telling anyway.

 

WORDREAPER

12:35 PM ET

January 3, 2012

Reputation Rather Than Quality (but really, no Tufts or JHU?)

Tufts' absence makes sense because it's a small liberal arts school at the undergraduate level and usually gets overlooked in national polls, but no Johns Hopkins is surprising.

This just reads like a list from US News and World Report, which makes sense because all the survey seems to have done is ask professors and some practitioners what they thought of the undergraduate programs rather than attempt an actual analysis of the the rigor and quality of the programs themselves. The universities with the most famous, wealthiest, and DC-centric undergraduate schools are naturally going to be on top because those are the first ones that come to people's minds when you ask about anything undergraduate in any survey. (Except the DC-centric part is specific to IR, obviously.) The results could have been almost the same if the survey ranked undergraduate English programs.

It's a survey of reputation, not rigor or quality, and should not be misrepresented.

 

ANGELO_MATEO

1:48 PM ET

January 3, 2012

Where would you rank

Where would you rank University of Toronto and/or other schools that are outside of the United States? Its a disappointment that only American universities were considered for this list.

 

BERKUT

5:04 PM ET

January 3, 2012

Worthless

This survey asked a large number of professors who know nothing about the content of undergraduate programs beyond which scholars teach at the school to rank them. An undergraduate program's quality is very different from that of a PhD program-- the latter's job is to produce professors, and the former's is to provide an education. If you actually want to rank a specific IR program and not just regurgitate school reputation or a departmental roster, you'd need to examine things like course selection, faculty teaching, opportunities for independent research, internship support, student organizations, career outcomes, IR-related alumni networks, or even average SAT scores to gauge student competitiveness.

So this survey is even more worthless than the master's program one, which is almost a reproduction of common notions of where to go for an IR career, except for the failure to distinguish between full and partial members of APSIA.

FP would do well to explain at the start of the article what exactly the TRIP survey measures in this regard-- the blurbs that mention student groups and such only support the illusion that actual research supports this roster.

 

DOMINOES

1:37 AM ET

January 4, 2012

redo

I want a redo on my schooling, after having looked at these schools, I wish I would have gone there...they seem like they offer some serious opportunities to students...too bad I did not know how to calculategpa but I was too busy eatin on dulse...better luck next time for me...life must go on.

 

BLESS

9:27 AM ET

January 4, 2012

Great Details

Thank you for the good share. The ideas were so brilliant. Never thought I would find some good ideas from here.

blessy

 

BLESS

9:31 AM ET

January 4, 2012

Great Details

Thank you for the good share. The ideas were so brilliant. Never thought I would find some good ideas from here.

blessy

 

MASON SHARPE

9:48 AM ET

January 4, 2012

what makes a great school

I always wonder whether the Schools' programs are what make their foreign studies programs so great, or is it due to a school's significant amount of foreign students that are at the school. With the latter, students learn not only learn inside the classroom, but interact will tons of foreign students throughout the day. Especially when shopping at Miami retail shopping centers, one gets to interact with the Hispanic cultures on a daily basis

 

JAXDAD2010

3:40 PM ET

January 4, 2012

Where is U of H?

As a former University of Houston student, you are crazy for leaving it off the list!

 

VCHALETS

12:31 AM ET

January 8, 2012

Stanford ...

Surprisingly Stanford is more expensive than Harvard but drops to number three placement. Condoleeza is probably not happy with these rankings. I had money riding on Princeton. I enjoyed reading how uch they all cost. Regards, VChalets

 

JMBELAN

10:31 AM ET

January 8, 2012

who knew?

What a surprise to learn that all the most prestigious schools have the best programs! I guess that means that if you go anywhere else, you might as well forget about it. Perhaps it's simply the stupid bias of someone who teaches at a small liberal arts college but I have seen little evidence from watching the course of US foreign policy over the past 20 years for the proposition that going to the finest schools produces the finest foreign policy. This is insular beltway thinking at its worst. This is all academic politics. You produce not a shred of evidence that these programs actually provide one with the tools for developing a more insightful view of the world.. Its like the Oscars--fun, but everyone knows lot of great movies and performances get passed over each year because they didn't come out at the right time. Likewise, the student who comes out of a Dickinson or Kenyon or any number of other good schools who then goes on to work overseas for a few years for an NGO, the PC, or something like that, master a language on the ground, and then go to a good MIR program. Few things are more annoying than the kind of know-it-alls who to the Harvard-SAIS route and make little effort to actually understand the rest of the world on the ground.

 

FLEM

7:28 AM ET

January 10, 2012

Good food for thought here.

Good food for thought here. Thanks, it's been very interesting.
femmes russes

 

FRED MERTZ72

6:51 PM ET

January 11, 2012

Israel is the root of all problems

Not once did I say anything about Jews. It is neo-con Israel who is creating the problems.

Israel is the real terrorists. settlements in the West Bank is untenable, and evacuating settlements there would help Israel hold on to land within Israel itself.

 

KHAWARJ

9:23 PM ET

January 11, 2012

You missed

Where would you rank University of Toronto and/or other schools that are outside of the United States? Its a disappointment that only American universities were considered for this list.

Compensation for whiplash

 

MARTIN B

6:26 PM ET

January 12, 2012

hmm

This is a bit interesting
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