<p>Hey,</p>
<p>I’m a prospective undergraduate that’s looking for colleges that have a strong behavioral psychology and cognitive science program.</p>
<p>From my initial research, the ones that trend toward the top are: MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Columbia, and others. I’d like to go to a school where a lot of research is going on, and leaders in the field are present.</p>
<p>Thank you!</p>
<p>Make sure that Penn is on your list. Its Biological Basis of Behavior program is one of the oldest, most comprehensive, and most research-intensive undergraduate neuroscience programs in the country:</p>
<p>[Biological</a> Basis of Behavior Program](<a href=“http://www.sas.upenn.edu/bbb/]Biological”>Neuroscience Program - Home | Neuroscience)</p>
<p>Of course, it helps that faculty members and researchers from Penn’s top-ranked medical school, veterinary school, nursing school, and hospitals are all located right there on campus, and serve as faculty of the BBB program along with members of Penn’s eminent Psychology Department. Plus, Penn will soon begin construction of an $80 million Neural-Behavioral Sciences Building that will become the home of the BBB program, right in the middle of all of those health science schools and research facilities:</p>
<p>[PennConnects</a> : Neural Behavioral Sciences Overview](<a href=“Penn Connects : A Vision for the Future.”>Penn Connects : A Vision for the Future.)</p>
<p>Michigan </p>
<p>10 char</p>
<p>Definitely Michigan. Aim for a large research school. Usually the publics (Berkeley, LA, SD, Michigan) pour tons of money into research. Non-pubs like UPenn, JHU(huge research school), MIT as well.</p>
<p>^ As a general guide, here’s a list of the top recipients (universities and hospitals) of NIH (National Institutes of Health) research funding in 2010:</p>
<p>[Top</a> NIH grant funding by institutions, states for 2010 - MedCity News](<a href=“http://medcitynews.com/2011/03/top-nih-grant-funding-by-institutions-states-for-2010/]Top”>Top NIH grant funding by institutions, states for 2010 - MedCity News)</p>
<p>Behavioral psychology and cognitive science are quite different approaches.
Most psychology departments are dominated by cognitive psychology and neuroscience. If you are interested in the field called the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (i.e., operant psychology), which is what I understand by “behavioral psychology” then you’ll find programs at Kansas, Florida, Nevada-Reno, Western Michigan and some others. You’ll find researchers who specialize in EAB at a broader range of schools. Check the listing for the editorial board of the Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior to get an idea of where some of these researchers are located. [Journal</a> of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior - Editorial Board - Wiley Online Library](<a href=“http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1938-3711/homepage/EditorialBoard.html]Journal”>http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1938-3711/homepage/EditorialBoard.html). If you are interested in the field called Applied Behavior analysis, you’ll find many more schools with programs in that area. Check the website of the Association for Behavior Analysis International for some of those: [Accredited</a> Programs - Association for Behavior Analysis International](<a href=“http://www.abainternational.org/accreditation/accredited-programs.aspx]Accredited”>Welcome - Association for Behavior Analysis International) and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis ([Archive</a> of “Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis”.](<a href=“http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/309/]Archive”>Archive of "Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis". - PMC)).</p>
<p>You won’t find too many departments at the undergraduate level that will have a subspecialty in behavioral psychology. Most will offer a major in general psychology. You might be able to do some research as an undergrad with faculty members who do take a behavioral approach, though. Even if you did specialize in behavioral psychology at the graduate level, exposure to other subspecialties and approaches is beneficial. Among other courses you will take, make sure you take coursework that focuses on learning/conditioning and animal behavior. You also would benefit from coursework in economics (including behavioral economics) and philosophy, among other areas.</p>
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<p>Thanks for this. I’ll take a look at Penn; their program looks pretty good and I’ve heard a couple of friends mention that it’s worth looking into as well.</p>
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<p>Right on, good to know that. Thanks!</p>
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<p>Nice, it looks like a lot of the places I’m looking at are up there.</p>
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<p>Thanks for this informed view of it. To be honest, I don’t really know yet what my specialization is going to be, but most likely leaning towards behavior. Good call on the other courses; I’m definitely interested in them, and will certainly be taking those classes.</p>
<p>Thanks for the other options mentioned. I’ll definitely check them out and see what the programs are like and talk to some folks from there. I’m also still looking at Stanford, Columbia, and MIT, potentially Brown and UPenn. For those, any ideas on which is a better program with more of the smart people?</p>
<p>I am in Columbia’s psychology department (as a grad student) and you are right, we are a great place to study cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Lots of strengths and research opportunities! And access to fMRI scanners, plus an interdisciplinary focus on neuroscience and neurobiology if that interests you.</p>
<p>Others are Harvard, UCSD, Michigan, Yale, WashU, Indiana, and UC-Berkeley. University of Rochester also has a good department of brain & cognitive sciences; Brown has a great department of cognitive & linguistic sciences; Johns Hopkins has a great cognitive science major with good offerings.</p>
<p>Remember though that as an undergrad, your job is to get a good breadth in psychology in general. There are other courses that may be really useful for a cognitive scientist, like neuroscience courses, psychology of learning, possibly developmental or social psychology if your research interests intersect with those fields. You also want to take classes in computer science (not advanced, necessarily - but programming helps) and statistics, since most of the analysis you’ll do will be statistical and strong computational skills help. Statistical analysis of imaging data is a rising field and a very lucrative one at the moment. You only need classes on animal behavior if you’re planning on using animal models (many, but not all, cognitive scientists do) and you’ll only need economics courses if you are interested in the cognitive bases of economic decisions (but this is a very lucrative field, and one that Columbia has strengths in I might add). You don’t need classwork in philosophy at all; it’s interesting and may enrich your understanding of the basis of psychology, but not necessary.</p>
<p>Also remember that as an undergrad, you likely won’t be working directly with those big name professors. You’ll be working for their grad students or their postdocs. (That’s the way it works here.) Not that you still shouldn’t aim for the top schools with great programs, but as an undergrad you won’t be specializing; you’ll be gaining a foundational knowledge. Specializing is for grad school.</p>
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<p>Not really, not in the modern sense. I’m not really sure what the OP meant by “behavioral psychology”. All psychology is behavioral to some degree, since psychology is by definition the study of human behavior among other things. Cognitive psychology is often the study of behavioral outcomes and how cognition affects them and vice versa. “Experimental analysis of behavior” is what every psychologist who uses experimental methods does, since psychology is the study of the mind, brain, and behavior.</p>
<p>None of those programs has more “smart people” than any other, but they may have strengths in different ways. MIT, for example, has a lot of strengths in computational cognitive science and linguistics, if you are interested in cognitive bases of language. Our department (Columbia) has a lot of people working on cognitive neuroscience, social cognition, and decision-making, and like I said several of our professors collaborate with the business school and do research on economic decision-making. One of the strengths of our department is also the collaborative/interdisciplinary nature of it, as we encourage students to combine the 3 subfields we have in different ways (social, cognitive, neuroscience) and also to combine psychology with heaps of other fields.</p>
<p>Below is a list of colleges with the highest PhD production rates in psychology, adjusted for program size. Column 2 shows the number of alumni psychology PhDs earned from 2007-11. Column 3 shows the number of BAs awarded in psychology from 2002-06. Column 4 is the number in column 2 divided by the number in column 3. I’ve eliminated colleges with fewer than 10 PhDs for the period. (Source: NSF/webcaspar.nsf.com)</p>
<p>7 of the top 10 are small liberal arts colleges. It may be the case that a higher level of student-faculty engagement, with instruction by professors not graduate students, trumps high research spending or more extensive course offerings. However, self-selection factors may also affect the results. In addition, we don’t know where students are getting their degrees. So this should not be construed as a program quality ranking.</p>
<p>College … Alumni PhDs in Psych 2007-11 … Psych Grads 2002-06 … PhD Production Rate
Hampshire College 10 31 32.3%
Grinnell College 23 73 31.5%
Cornell University, All Campuses 154 491 31.4%
Oberlin College 31 126 24.6%
Swarthmore College 23 107 21.5%
Franklin and Marshall College 23 120 19.2%
Haverford College 19 110 17.3%
Pomona College 24 141 17.0%
Carnegie Mellon University 48 287 16.7%
Brown University 79 476 16.6%
Vassar College 48 290 16.6%
Macalester College 30 183 16.4%
Colby College 20 125 16.0%
Williams College 37 240 15.4%
Wellesley College 46 311 14.8%
Colgate University 29 197 14.7%
Furman University 24 172 14.0%
Connecticut College 27 197 13.7%
Kenyon College 24 176 13.6%
Knox College 15 110 13.6%
Amherst College 22 165 13.3%
Reed College 18 136 13.2%
Hamilton College 19 149 12.8%
Washington and Lee University 12 95 12.6%
University of Pennsylvania 106 841 12.6%
Southwestern University 17 137 12.4%
Princeton University 44 358 12.3%
Carleton College 20 164 12.2%
Yale University 81 665 12.2%
Lawrence University 13 110 11.8%
Tufts University 68 579 11.7%
Barnard College 39 336 11.6%
Rhodes College 14 122 11.5%
Harvard University 82 732 11.2%
Stanford University 58 527 11.0%
Claremont McKenna College 13 120 10.8%
Bowdoin College 12 112 10.7%
Davidson College 22 208 10.6%
Luther College 17 164 10.4%
Wesleyan University 40 387 10.3%
Bucknell University 25 247 10.1%</p>
<p>The two top psychology programs in the country are consistently Stanford and Berkeley…year in and year out…</p>
<p>[Best</a> Psychology Programs | Top Psychology Schools | US News Best Graduate Schools](<a href=“http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-humanities-schools/psychology-rankings]Best”>http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-humanities-schools/psychology-rankings)</p>
<p>Re: Post #8
“Not really, not in the modern sense. I’m not really sure what the OP meant by “behavioral psychology”. All psychology is behavioral to some degree, since psychology is by definition the study of human behavior among other things. Cognitive psychology is often the study of behavioral outcomes and how cognition affects them and vice versa. “Experimental analysis of behavior” is what every psychologist who uses experimental methods does, since psychology is the study of the mind, brain, and behavior.”</p>
<p>Sure, psychology has broadly adopted a methodological behaviorism, so in that sense it is “behavioral,” and, clearly, research psychologists conduct experiments. Nonetheless, the field known as “the experimental analysis of behavior” is not what every psychologist does. EAB (and its sister field of applied behavior analysis) is a distinct theoretical and methodological approach based in the operant psychology developed by Skinner and his successors. It’s that approach to which I referred to in my earlier post, which was a reply to the OP’s question about “behavioral psychology.” In retrospect, I’m not quite what the OP understands by the term, “behavioral psychology,” but my reply referenced what is commonly understood by that term. It is clearly different than cognitive psychology.</p>
<p>“The two top psychology programs in the country are consistently Stanford and Berkeley…year in and year out…”</p>
<p>The top departments are all ranked very closely…year in and year out.</p>
<p>^ Moreover, the ranking cited in #10 is a graduate program ranking based entirely on subject peer assessments. Even if they do have some (or even considerable) validity as graduate program rankings, they don’t necessarily apply perfectly to undergraduate programs. A graduate program that is large and highly productive in research output might garner strong peer assessments, yet at the undergraduate level feature large classes taught frequesntly by grad students (and seldom by the star faculty whose work jacks up the strong peer assessments). </p>
<p>A more robust graduate program ranking than USNWR is the NRC/Chronicle ranking. [NRC</a> Rankings Overview: Psychology - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“NRC Rankings Overview: Psychology”>NRC Rankings Overview: Psychology) Unfortunately, this ranking is more complex and harder to interpret. Schools with many high component scores include Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Wisconsin. An older (and simpler) NRC ranking was done in the early 1990s ([NRC</a> Rankings in Each of 41 Areas](<a href=“http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/nrc41.html#area40]NRC”>http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/nrc41.html#area40))</p>