Political Science and D.C. colleges

WashDad
Sat, 25 Nov 2006 22:54:59 +0000

Political science is an academic (aka “liberal arts”) field, not a professional one. Researchers at Rice and LSU did a ranking of how good a job a political science department did in training productive PoliSci PhDs in relation to the size of the program. Their measurement was the research publication activity of program graduates, per graduate. Their list surprised me, and did not match “reputational rankings” which they also included:


Texas A&M
Univ Illinois, Chicago
North Texas
UC Irvine
Cal Tech (a friend of mine was a Poli Sci major at Tech)
Rochester
Wisconsin, Milwaukee
West Virginia
Washington U, St. Louis
SUNY, Stony Brook


No Ivy League school was in the top 20.

These sorts of lists are always interesting. The reputation of academic programs is nearly always different among professionals in the field rather than among people like most of us in CC. You know, those of us who really don’t know what we are talking about from personal expertise…