Best Places To Study Psychology

Psychology holds an unusual spot among academic subjects: it lets students put their own untested ideas to the test through experiment. Demand for psychology programs has climbed steeply over the last few years, and the reasons are not hard to find.

A lot of it comes down to work. Compared with other humanities subjects, psychology tends to open more doors into actual jobs, and that alone pulls people in. The research side is enormous too, which keeps feeding the appetite for coursework. Look at enrollment numbers and you can see the share of students picking the harder, more advanced psychology programs rising right alongside the general interest.

Plenty of universities across different cities now offer degrees in the field, and here is where applicants often go wrong. Each institution tends to have a specialty of its own, so you cannot pick a school on reputation alone; you have to understand what sets one apart from another. Now and then a program with a strong curriculum sits inside a school that never shows up near the top of the rankings. The University of Minnesota is one example of a place where the teaching is genuinely good. Recent studies single it out for the quality of its faculty, and it has become a solid choice for anyone interested in university psychology and personality genetics.

The University of Michigan runs one of the largest psychology programs anywhere. Famous for its sheer scale, it is sometimes described as the last word in where to study the subject, and its department offers degrees in nearly every branch of the discipline. Harvard belongs in this conversation as well, since it is one of the places where the academic study of psychology earned its standing. It opened a psychology department back in the 1800s and still ranks among the strongest schools for graduate work. Stanford is tied to psychology education in almost every way imaginable. Home to a number of research laboratories devoted to the field, it keeps drawing students for all sorts of reasons.

Yale is another good place to train across a wide range of psychology courses. It sits in the same company as Stanford and Harvard among the most sought-after programs. What makes it stand out is its New Haven campus, where students can take part in current, leading research rather than reading about it from a distance.

UCSD rounds out the list as one of the best destinations for clinical training and research. Based in San Diego, it has built a reputation for a set of psychology courses that many consider stronger than what rival faculties put forward. The field has splintered into many concentrations by now, so the school you choose should match the faculty's interests and experience and the kind of research actually being done there. Human behavior is not an easy thing to figure out, but learning it from people who have mastered it, at the right institution, changes what you walk away with.