Stanford vs. Yale vs. Georgetown

juillet
Fri, 21 Apr 2017 20:22:10 +0000

Comparing the prestige between Stanford, Yale and Georgetown is really splitting hairs. If you are only comparing universities within the top 30 or so universities in the U.S. then yes, Yale and Stanford are more prestigious than Georgetown. But in the grand scheme of things, Georgetown is an excellent and prestigious university that any student should be proud to have on their resume. It’s kind of insanity to say that Georgetown seems out of place on a list of elite universities. Yale and Stanford are ranked #3 and #5 and Georgetown #20 in the U.S. News rankings. They’re all in the top less than 1% of U.S. colleges and universities. They are all excellent schools!

You also don’t have to go to the most excellent political science department. For undergrad, you just need a good department at an excellent school, and you will get that at any of the three schools you are comparing.

That said, Stanford’s political science doctoral program is ranked in the top 5 programs in the country. U.S. News ranks it #1, tied with Harvard, and the NRC ranks it between 1 and 9 (they have an idiosyncratic system that gives you a range of rankings, but it’s ranked very highly). There’s not a perfect correlation with undergraduate education, mind you, but it might be worth something. At the very least you know that you will have professors who are on the cutting edge and well known in political science.

Stanford also has a [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stanford_University_people#Politics]long[/url] list of alumni who are in politics and government, including Herbert Hoover, several foreign presidents and prime ministers, lots of Senators, many U.S. Representatives, several governors, lots of ambassadors, and a long list of other U.S. and California state politicians. The list also includes four Supreme Court justices (Rehnquist, O’Connor, Kennedy, and Breyer) and many, many other U.S. federal judges and attorneys. And yes, I checked; most of these people attended undergrad, including all four of the SC justices.

So if you love Stanford, and you want to go there, you don’t have to feel like it’s not going to set up up for a career in whatever you want to do. It will.

But Yale and Georgetown are also great choices, with good to great political science departments and long lists of alumni currently involved in law, politics and government. Really, you can flip a coin or roll a die and not go wrong.