What are the best universities for studying social science?

What are the best universities/graduate schools for studying atmospheric/climate science?

• Answer:

  There are actually two major divisions of atmospheric science. One is climate science (which tends to be more theoretical), and the other is meteorology. The people in the two different camps actually don't interact with each other as much as many think. Also, a lot of climate scientists interact a lot with oceanographers too. For more traditional climate science, the strongest schools are the University of Washington, Colorado State, MIT, Columbia, Scripps (at UCSD), and Princeton. UW, MIT, and Scripps are also strong in Oceanography. There are also strong climate modelers in other schools (e.g. Harvard, Caltech, Berkeley), too, but there tends to be a small number of them (though you could have the advantage of interacting with more people outside of climate science that way). UCLA, Colorado, Wisconsin, Cornell, and Miami also have decent research programs in climate science. I'm not sure if others regard them as top-tier though. But in general, climate scientists care less about rankings/"prestige" than people in other areas, in large part because it's basically impossible to compare [1]. UC-Irvine is ranked highly on NRC, but I haven't seen many top applicants apply there for some reason. For meteorology, the schools you hear the most about are the University of Oklahoma, Florida State, University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State, and Colorado State. == You can also look outside of the nation too. ETH-Zurich, the University of Reading, and the University of Bergen (Norway) have significant amounts of research activity in climate science. You can also find the NRC rankings here: http://graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/oceanography. Bear in mind, though, that I'd probably trust the rankings here less than I'd trust those for any other discipline (since the ways that universities organize atmospheric science departments is so diverse that many of them simply aren't included there, or end up being discounted). The programs that strong students apply to also tend to be super-diverse (I've seen some students who pretty much go all-Ivy + UW + Scripps, and other students who go primarily for meteorology programs + UW). There are students willing to turn down Princeton and MIT down for places like UW, and Maryland (I know students who would even choose Colorado State over Princeton and MIT). The most common schools that strong students apply to are UW, MIT, Princeton, Columbia, and Scripps. == [1] I actually wonder if this is simply because university administrations simply don't care much about prioritizing these sorts of programs. University administrators at top schools say that they want their university to be the "best" in everything, and that can really distort things. But climate science is an "ignored" field for the most part, so there isn't as disproportionate of an allocation of resources between "highly-ranked schools" and "lower-ranked schools" that you might find in another more traditional academic discipline. The "average" PhD student at a place like, say, Harvard, is probably smarter than the average PhD student at a place like Colorado State (they're also probably more likely to be broader). But you might get more resources and support at Colorado State. In any case, students in climate science seem to get more interaction with their professor than students in, say, fields like biochemistry or physics, so the student-adviser relationship becomes more important there.