Good comparative departments in the #15-30 range?

[Helix]

I'm working on my list of schools for Fall '12 and simultaneously working through an SoP that makes better sense of my interests, but I want to make sure I have a good, broad range of places selected and seem to keep running into walls.

I have my top choices pretty well hammered out, but what I'd really like are some *good* programs generally agreed to "rank" somewhere in the 15-30 range and to be decent for comparative. My regional interests are mostly in Asia and I'm broadly interested in themes having to do with democratization and non-democratic entrenchment, political economy, and violence (gee, broad enough for you?).

Without giving too much away about myself, what kinds of places would folks recommend I look into to fill out the "safer" end of my list of schools? My biggest challenge has been making sure these schools have *anyone* who works on anywhere in Asia at all, and also concerns that some of the schools might not offer funding to everyone they admit--definitely don't want to end up in that pickle.

Thoughts anyone?

[Penelope Higgins]

Don't know exactly where the line between top 15 and 15-30 is, but I'd make sure to look at Cornell, Ohio State, Texas, Northwestern, Wisconsin, and University of Washington given your substantive and regional interests. These are all programs I would think of as falling more-or-less into the range you describe, and as far as I know they fund all admits (I could be wrong about this).

I'm working on my list of schools for Fall '12 and simultaneously working through an SoP that makes better sense of my interests, but I want to make sure I have a good, broad range of places selected and seem to keep running into walls.

I have my top choices pretty well hammered out, but what I'd really like are some *good* programs generally agreed to "rank" somewhere in the 15-30 range and to be decent for comparative. My regional interests are mostly in Asia and I'm broadly interested in themes having to do with democratization and non-democratic entrenchment, political economy, and violence (gee, broad enough for you?).

Without giving too much away about myself, what kinds of places would folks recommend I look into to fill out the "safer" end of my list of schools? My biggest challenge has been making sure these schools have *anyone* who works on anywhere in Asia at all, and also concerns that some of the schools might not offer funding to everyone they admit--definitely don't want to end up in that pickle.

Thoughts anyone?

[blankets]

Thank you Helix for this great question. I'm sure that the answer is available with some due diligence, however I'd love to hear others thoughts. If I may, I'd like to also open the discussion to good comparative departments in the second tier in general. And Helix, no doubt you've heard it before, but perhaps you should look at schools that have asian studies departments or a strong asian component in related disciplines like anthropology or economics. Also, are any Canadian programs strong in asian studies, maybe UBC?

[Helix]

These are super helpful suggestions--if only because it confirms a lot of what I've been hearing from other folks.

My biggest concern (besides fit and placement of graduates) is just making sure that I have a good "spread" of programs and am not too "top heavy" in my program choices so that I'm better positioned to get in somewhere at least. So certainly the 15-30 isn't a hard and fast rule, but more an indication of places that probably wouldn't make someone's top 10 list, but which are definitely strong and produce academics who are contenders for good placements.

In terms of departments with Asian Studies--it's a decent suggestion, but also one where I can't rely too much on rankings. I've hit up the listings of all the national resource centers as a first pass, and am trying to make sure I'm not too California-heavy since I know the UC system has been hit hard this year. Some of these seem like they might be red herrings with respect to polisci though (for example, Pitt is an East Asia National Resource Center, but their polisci as I understand it is heavily LatAm).

I'm not familiar with Canada's university system, but isn't UBC one of the better schools? I'm looking for things that are great fits to help me fill in, say, between UCSD and Emory-level. But I'll definitely look into it!