some_dog

I think it depends on what you want to do with the degree. As globalsun mentioned, it does seem like an MBA "light". But it is an ivy league and the name recognition goes pretty far. Also, networking opportunities at SIPA tend to be pretty good. If you want to be a consultant in private industry it might be worth it since it is in New York, so job placement tends to be decent. But as far as actually doing something in IR, I'm a little skeptical.

Thanks for the replies. I'm still a little undecided but I'm slowly edging towards UW just because it will put me in less debt. However, I do think that academically, if I choose to pursue a PhD, Georgetown might put me in better standing since their department seems to be more theoretical while UW has more of an engineering/industry slant. On a side note, I wish I had realized the poll option before. That would have been very useful. But it seems silly to start a new topic now. Oh well.

since no replies, just bumping

Georgetown or University of Washington? Which school do you think has more name recognition and prestige? I got into the Masters program for Computational Linguistics for both universities but I'm not sure which one I should go to. Obviously I recognize that prestige should not be the only factor for deciding which school to attend but it is one of the variables I am having the most trouble quantifying. Other factors include cost and the quality of academics. Academically, I believe the Georgetown program is a little better. But Georgetown is also more than twice as expensive as UW; something like $80K vs $30K for UW for the total cost of the degree. Unfortunately I haven't been able to scrape up funding from either program so far, so I'll probably have to pay for it on my own. Intuitively, I feel that Georgetown has a bit more name recognition which could be important in looking for a job afterwords. If I didn't have to care about money it would be Georgetown without a doubt. But that $50K difference is pretty big and I'm not really sure a Georgetown degree is worth that much more than a UW degree. The reason I think "prestige" is so important is because, while I love linguistics, I still want to leave open the possibility that I might not be doing this 15-20 years from now, so I still want my degree to have some value (even if it's only cachet). What do you guys think? Any thoughts?