For what it's worth: Four of the top eight international relations master's programs are located in the Washington, D.C., area, according to Foreign Policy magazine's latest survey of U.S. scholars.
The new rankings do not differ significantly from previous ones by the magazine, which surveys scholars on the issue every two years. Only three non-U.S. schools made the list of the top 20 international development programs: Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics, all in England.
Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies, George Washington University and American University were among the top-ranked schools located in the nation's capital. The study noted that these programs have a clearer policy focus as opposed to "purely academic pursuits."
There were a couple of surprises. The master's programs at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies and at the University of California in San Diego tied for twelfth place (together with Yale and MIT), beating Stanford, which came in at sixteenth. Also noteworthy is the University of Kentucky, whose master's program ranked seventeenth.
For doctoral programs, the usual suspects snatched the top five spots: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia and Yale. Among the more unexpected mentions was the University of Rochester, which came in sixteenth, beating out New York University and Cambridge, which took seventeenth and twentieth, respectively.
Like many academic rankings, the results should be taken with a grain of salt. The study was conducted by asking 1,743 scholars to rank each others' programs. Among the factors that influence college rankings, a criterion as subjective as reputation is difficult to quantify. In fact, more and more scholars are refusing to participate in the notoriously "unscientific" surveys on academic reputation.
Also, what academics think of other institutions may have been more important in the past, when going past a bachelor's degree was seen as a surefire way to wall oneself away in academia. But these days, as getting master's degree has become increasingly de rigueur for development professionals, it may be more relevant to gauge the weight that graduate programs carry among employers.
