Graduate schools outside the U.S.A. [Archive]

MarxSchmarx

16th April 2011, 05:39

My honest advice is to get a masters first and then decide if you really want to get a doctorate in your specialty - one real advantage of a masters is that it exposes you to a broad enough array of active, current research questions that you're much more likely to choose the right dissertation topic than if you were rushed in your first year or two of PhD studies.

And I guess if you have personal reasons to leave the US you might as well, but to be honest an American doctorate carries a lot of weight the world over.

Anywho.

Many (though certainly not all) Canadian universities let you apply for a PhD without a masters. I think with the numbers you gave you might be competitive for high-profile places like UBC or York but to be honest I don't know the political science landscape all that well. New Zealand, Singaporean and Australian schools are also quite open to students from abroad in terms of funding.

Another option to seriously consider is a place like the American University in Cairo or Beirut - given your interest #3 field work opportunities couldn't be better. I believe some universities in Israel are also English language at the PhD level.

Most schools in Britain/Ireland won't give you good funding unless you are an EU citizen. There are a few universities in mainland Europe where teh primary instruction is English and that fund non-EU students well (I think the ETZ or somesuch in Zurich) with good political science programs, but the crude impression I get is that most of these tend to be associated with state research institutions and their social science curricula are primarily for training bureaucrats rather than academics. Certainly English is the language of PhD-level instruction in many Dutch and Scandinavian universities; to a lesser extent German and French and other southern European universities generally don't use English as an instruction.

Finally there are a handful of doctorate granting English-language universities in formerly British colonies in developing nations like India, Pakistan, Nigeria and South Africa that have a more "theoretical" political science orientation. Generally with the exception of the South African universities and students of the natural sciences/engineering, my impression is that social science is severely underfunded and that students that do graduate tend to stay in the country/region they graduated from.

And of course if you're OK without being in an English speaking university, I guess it comes down to your language skills. If you are competent in Spanish I'd say UNAM in Mexico City is probably THE premier Spanish language university in the world with lots of amazing academic work and very solid support - plus it has a great activist scene. There are of course solid national universities throughout Latin America and Spain, although my understanding is that (as a generality) the constitutional theory tends to be very heavily based on natural law and with a heavy focus on civil law traditions. Again, this isn't my field but it is the impression I get from speaking with poli sci or law graduates of a few regional schools in the Hispanic world.