When you are looking at Lamborghinis a Lexus doesn’t look very exciting.
If you have UCB as a ‘pretty darn likely’ (which assumes you achieve the stats you are projecting), then having mostly dream schools is not an issue. Then what matters is how important it is to you to go out of state- and how much your parents are willing to pay for the privilege.
If you look at GWU and AU with an IR lens, it will change your perception of them. They are solidly in the second tier of IR schools with Yale, UChicago and UCB. The Foreign Policy ranking has them in order of Y, UChicago, GWU, AU and UCB with no schools in between. My view is that if want to be an IR professional (opposed to an academic), GWU with its in term internships is hard to beat by any school.
When you reach the stage at which you begin to seek matches and additional reaches to research, consider undergraduate-focused schools such as Claremont McKenna, Vassar, Wesleyan and Connecticut College, which offer a nice range of programs in political science, IR and Jewish studies.
@tkoparent , Denison University’s program looks really interesting, thanks for the reccomendation. It’s certainly worth checking out.
@Eeyore123 , I’m not actually sure if I do want to go the professional route or if I want to go academic. As of right now, I’m really interested in political theory (I’m also thinking about minoring in philosophy, and I know I will definitely at least take a few classes in it). Obvously that can change once I start actually taking college classes and seeing if the academic route is right for me. I know that GWU and AU are excellent schools, I really think that my perception of them as the mediocre safeties for polisci and IR messes up how I actually think of them. I’m sure when I start doing more research into them and possibly visit them I’ll be more excited.
@merc81 , yeah, I’ll definitely look into the liberal arts schools that you mentioned. I’m familiar with all of them, but I wasn’t really sure if they would have strong polisci or IR programs.
GWU is absolutely not a safety school if you are applying to the Elliot school, which I assume you would be. It’s competitive. You may want to read through some past results threads for GWU here on CC. Definitely high stats kids who don’t get in.
AU practices yield protection so while you may think of it as safety school based on your stats, you’ll need to show interest to get an offer. If you have naviance, have a look at that. At my daughter’s school AU tended to WL everyone above a 3.8. It’s one school I would be very cautious about calling a safety (unless you apply ED, whicH you obviously won’t).
My daughter was also aiming at IR for college, so we looked closely at these two. But the advice about not going for one trick ponies is also solid (although I do think that’s a slightly unfair characterization of GWU and AU). My daughter was totally convinced she was going to major in IR but changed her mind during freshman year. A college with other solid options is definitely a good idea.
@SJ2727 is spot on- on everything.
@sj2727, my niece went to JHU for IR- and switched after 1 semester, thanks to a a required gen ed course for 1st years that she would never, ever have signed up for on her own. She just defended her PhD thesis on the application of data analytics and modeling to pharmacological research 
zbsarver,
“As of right now, I’m really interested in political theory (I’m also thinking about minoring in philosophy, and I know I will definitely at least take a few classes in it).”
For both breadth and depth, the best programs for political theory / philosophy are generally agreed to be Chicago, Harvard, Princeton.
Also Notre Dame, if you’re a bit more conservative. Columbia and UCB are also strong; Brown is moving up. The Wash. DC-based programs are much more focused on practitioners. (For IR Theory in particular, as mentioned TOSU is at or near the top of the list, as are Columbia and Chicago. Caution: U Chicago’s leading IR theorist is not shall we say a friend of Israel. YMMV. )
Re LACs, you can definitely find a good specialist here and there, but you won’t find anywhere near the range of approaches, subfields and perspectives that you will get from a major Tier I research u. Theory department comprising 5 or 6 tenure-track scholars who are experts in the field.
@SJ2727 , what you were saying about the one-trick pony definitely articulates some thoughts a little bit better. Also, for the overall competitiveness, I can see on my Navience that the people who get in and attend all have around 1200-1300 SATs (sometimes a bit lower, all the kids with higher stats end up going elsewhere), so maybe a better way to state my concerns would be that I’m worried that while the polisci/IR programs are excellent, I might find the overall school and student body underwhelming academically and socially? Although I guess that goes for pretty much any safety school.
Also- I really don’t want to sound stuck up or that I inflate my own intelligence, but I’m really intellectually oriented and I generally find it difficult to connect with people who aren’t as academically focused as I am. One of my biggest concerns about college, and part of why I want to go to a top college so much, is that I I don’t think that I would like an environment where students aren’t quite as academic.
In terms of majoring in something else, I’m also interested in philosophy and psychology, although it’ll be hard to tell if I would want to pursue either fields at all until I get into college and can start taking classes on them.
“I can see on my Navience that the people who get in and attend all have around 1200-1300 SATs (sometimes a bit lower, all the kids with higher stats end up going elsewhere), so maybe a better way to state my concerns would be that I’m worried that while the polisci/IR programs are excellent, I might find the overall school and student body underwhelming academically and socially? Although I guess that goes for pretty much any safety school.”
Generally, yes, but not for the Honors College students at the top public universities.
You’d be surprised at how strong/academically-serious are the honors college students at some less-prestigious but still excellent schools. This data is a couple of years old, so the numbers may have shifted a little, but these SAT scores are directionally and generally accurate:
Flagship U. - SAT Scores:
…All Students (75th %ile)…Average SAT - Honors College Students
U. Illinois…1500…1510
U. Minnesota…1480…1510
UCLA…1470…n/a
U Virginia…1460…1520
Ohio State…1450…1520
UC San Diego…1450…n/a
UT-Austin…1410…1480
Rutgers…1400…1506
U. Georgia…1370…1490
Yeah, the honors college is defenitely a good point. Just looking at some of the college confidential forums about the GWU honors program, it seems really great and just what I would be looking for in a safety/match school.
A couple of other things about GWU and AU. The GWU “campus” is very undefined. If someone didn’t tell you that you were on a college campus, you might not know. I love to the location. You can walk to all of the “mist see” things in DC. It also has a a Metro stop. It is a much longer walk/ bus to get to the Metro from AU or GTown. I don’t understand how the food plan works at GWU. At AU, we were told that it is impossible to get away from politics no matter your major. AU has great political communication and campaign management programs. They are very into the news cycle.
Generally, I think I would prefer to have a central campus. Certainly I wouldn’t want to go to NYU, which lacks a campus altogether, but of course I really can’t say if being integrated into city would actually be much of a downside.
Oh- one other thing. I generally don’t want to go to a school where most of the social life revolves around frats and partying all the time. I’m not sure how central those are to the student life at GWU or AU, but those would be kinda a turn-off from the schools.
Where? Of the ones I discussed AU was “easiest” and they are 1220-1380 middle 50 for SAT. So that sounds a little low, unless you were talking about another school.
But yes, at any safety school you would be well above the average. That’s part of what makes it a safety school in the first place. So - that’s exactly why you need to be choosing a safety school carefully to try make sure you ‘d be happy if up end up there, so well done on a thoughtful approach to this rather than the somewhat mechanistic approach towards safeties we sometimes see on here.
Based on a few things you have indicated, Swarthmore could be in your future, at least as a school to research thoroughly, particularly if you might be interested in availing yourself of some courses at the other consortium schools.
@SJ2727, on my school’s navience, there was a student with a score in the 1100s, and since my school doesn’t have many applicants to AU, I think I probably underestimated the average SAT because of that.
@merc81, I’ll definitely keep Swarthmore in mind
Your classmate could have applied to AU for any major that’s not political science related… odds of admission are much, much higher. Not only is AU not a safety for International Relations, but it’s also not a safety for financial reasons- run the NPC.
You need to find 2 safeties: it means you’re well above the top 75% students, their acceptance rate is 40% or higher, and your parents can afford to pay what the NPC shows.
As a result, UChicago, Princeton, Harvard may well be top of their field, but they are reach for everyone … you’d need reachable reaches and matches, in addition to safeties.
Generally more accessible “intellectual” colleges include Wooster (safety), Reed, W&M(match)…
Swarthmore or Pomona would be reaches even for the very competitive applicant you want to be.
The real work isn’t finding dream schools, but finding safeties and matches that are a good fit for you.
@MYOS1634, yeah, the classmate probably did apply for a non polisci major. And finding safeties that I’m excited about going to is exactly the purpose of my question and this thread
A useful exercise for you might be to list the factors that are important to you, weight each factor in importance, and then give your potential safety colleges a score on each dimension.
If those weights are expressed in percentages that add up to 100%, then a simple sum of each school’s weighted score will yield a valid ranking. Your shortlist will become very clear.
For example, maybe you’d list these factors and weight them accordingly: