Good universities for linguistics?

tk21769
Wed, 17 Jul 2013 06:59:54 +0000

The list I offered above (#9) is based on the NRC 1995 ranking of graduate linguistics programs and on the more recent NRC rankings.

[NRC Rankings in Each of 41 Areas](NRC Rankings in Each of 41 Areas)
[url=NRC Rankings Overview: Linguistics]NRC Rankings Overview: Linguistics - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education/url

These are graduate program rankings and only cover research universities. I culled them down to schools that also rank highly for undergraduate education (by USNWR - hey, it’s what we’ve got :(). The LACs I mentioned came up in extensive discussions on this subject a couple years back with a poster who wound up at Swarthmore.

Different research universities are likely to have different areas of strength (maybe Penn in sociolinguistics, Chicago in historical linguistics, Stanford/JHU/UMass-A in computational linguistics, etc.) However, unless you are a very unusual HS student who got a whole lot out of those URI courses, you probably are not ready to choose an undergraduate school based on those distinctions. I suggest you consider overall academic quality, “fit”, and affordability, as well as the course offerings in linguistics.

Universities that shouldn’t be too reachy for your stats:
Georgetown (the CAS should be somewhat less selective than the SFS)
USC
NYU
Boston U.
many state universities (Ohio State, etc.; possibly even UCLA, which seems to have a very strong linguistics program)

LACs with fairly extensive linguistics offerings, but less selective than Swarthmore/Pomona:
Macalester
Lawrence University