Linguistics at Harvard

kyledavid80
Mon, 12 May 2008 17:24:29 +0000

From what I’ve found, Harvard’s linguistics program is somewhat mediocre. Some ling grads I spoke to even agreed it was a somewhat weak program.

If you look at the rankings, Harvard tends not to rank high in the field.

NRC ranking (old but relevant):

1 MIT 4.79
2 Stanford 4.59
3 UCLA 4.56
4 Massachusetts 4.44
5 Penn 4.16
6 Chicago 3.97
7 Cal Berkeley 3.97
8 Ohio State 3.80
9 Cornell 3.78
10 Cal Santa Cruz 3.66
11 Texas 3.61
12 Southern Cal 3.58
13 Arizona 3.58
14 Cal San Diego 3.43
15 CUNY 3.41
16 Connecticut 3.36
17 Washington 3.16
18 Illinois 3.10
19 Georgetown 3.00
20 Brown 2.94
21 Harvard 2.92

And the Gourman undergrad ranking:

UCLA
U Chicago
UC Berkeley
U Penn
Cornell
UC San Diego
Yale
U Illinois Urbana Champaign
Stanford
MIT
U Michigan Ann Arbor
Indiana U Bloomington
U Wisconsin Madison
U Washington
NYU
Ohio State
U Rochester
Harvard

My own exploration of the program leads me to believe that it has the potential, but the research, courses, etc. don’t seem to be on par with other schools of similar caliber (Stanford, for example).

You can dual-enroll in courses at MIT, which is known for its linguistics department, but as I’ve said before, MIT isn’t a good choice for undergrad linguistics.



It’s a tiny, tiny program – only graduates about 3 people in linguistics each year. The worst part of the program, though, is its course selection. It has a very good theoretical program, but its applied just plain sucks. Of course, you’re allowed to take courses at Harvard (with limitations), but overall, MIT’s undergrad isn’t as strong as its grad for ling. Its program grew mainly because it had Chomsky, but Chomsky has long retired (not to mention a lot of students disliked him for his infusion of political debate to his ling lectures).



(I’m not a student at Harvard or MIT, so take this all with a grain of salt.)