The best anthropology research universities are those with rich histories of influence, proven through the work produced by the program’s faculty and alumni. Beyond demonstrating scholarly impact in the field, the best anthropology degree programs maximize your opportunities to interact with outstanding anthropology faculty.
Earning a bachelor’s degree in anthropology can open numerous professionals doors. In addition to fields such as archaeology and museum curation, the research, critical thinking, and communication skills learned in this major can apply in a wide range of educational, scientific, and social services work settings. The best schools for anthropology will put you in a position to become an innovator and a leader in this exciting field.
Today, top influencers in anthropology are bringing new light to topics like military uses of anthropology, cultural influences on economies, human organ trafficking, and much more.
Anthropology studies human behaviors and characteristics with less focus on social influences than sociology. There are a lot of similarities, especially between cultural anthropology and sociology, but the focus is different. Anthropology focuses on the people — their behaviors, physical characteristics, and their responses to social structures, ie, their culture. Sociology focuses more on group behaviors and relations with social structures and institutions. Sociology uses qualitative and quantitative methods to study the causes and effect of social structures. Anthropologists more often utilize qualitative research methods like ethnography to study the changes that occur in people given their circumstances.
In an interview with us, Princeton Univerity Sociologist, Vivian Zelizer noted their similarities and common difference with psycholgy,[T]here are a lot of parallels between both fields in the sense that they’re both trying to understand social life, and in that sense, a contrast with psychology, which of course they’re interested in social life, but the focus is on the individual. Individual development, individual cognition, and both sociologists and anthropologists are more interested in the social relations, even though there are many splendid scholars in both of those fields that may specialise in cognitive aspects of social relationships. And I would say that in the past, the boundaries between sociology and anthropology were stronger in the sense that anthropologists would study primitive communities and other kinds of groups and less contemporary capitalist societies. But in the past years, anthropologists have done splendid ethnographies and studies of contemporary societies.
Anthropology is an excellent interdisciplinary major. The degree is typically composed of numerous distinct but related subject areas from history and linguistics to studies on world religion and race, alongside science-driven subjects such as evolutionary biology, archaeology, and forensics. As an anthropology major, you’ll get the chance to flex both your scientific muscles and sharpen your skills of critical analysis.
Once you’ve declared your major in anthropology, you will likely be required to complete a set of core courses in a number of related subject areas. While your concentration will give you a chance to choose from a wide range of highly-specialized anthropology electives, there are a several common courses that most anthropology majors will be required to take, including:
Anthropology is often divided into four distinct subdisciplines:
To answer this, we looked at internet search queries within the Education
category on Google Trends. Biological anthropology (also sometimes called physical anthropology
) is currently the most-searched field in anthropology, followed by medical anthropology, cultural anthropology, forensic anthropology, and linguistic anthropology (also known as ethnolinguistics
).
Anthropology is a highly specialized field. Those who will ultimately practice anthropology or archaeology will typically have earned a master’s degree. This will qualify you for a wide range of opportunities doing fieldwork, consultation, or education as an anthropologist, archeologist, or historian. But anthropology is also a versatile degree program. In addition to preparing you to enter into an advanced degree program in anthropology, a bachelor’s degree in anthropology could lead to a wide range of opportunities in forensics, education, biology, and much more. If you do choose to pursue anthropology as a career, your major can lead to these top jobs:
In pursuing a bachelor’s degree, you will need to choose between three kinds of schools: research universities, liberal arts colleges, and online colleges.
Research universities are colleges and universities whose faculty are active in research and publishing. These schools offer a wide array of doctoral programs, especially in the sciences. They tend to be big, with tens of thousands of students.
Do you prefer a larger university setting, such as largest public university in your state? Research universities are typically big, offering degrees in many different disciplines. Is a big high-powered research environment the thing for you. If not, you should think about a liberal arts college. In deciding on an undergraduate institution, ask yourself what sort of environment will best help you to be happy and excel.
Often referred to as “teaching colleges” liberal arts colleges put a premium on undergraduate studies and offers a broad range of subjects for students to study. A college of liberal arts typically provides smaller class sizes, more direct engagement with professors, and, most importantly, the opportunity to sample a wide range of subject areas on the way to a bachelor’s degree.
Online colleges are typically the same colleges and universities you could attend in-person, but for certain degree programs the college or unviersity has made the degree programs available to be completed online. For over 5 million students, online degree programs allow students to earn their degrees in the most flexible format available. Online degrees are as respected as the on-campus degress you could earn from the same schools. There’s usually no disctinction between the two degrees, and your degree and transcript will not say that the degree was earned online. Online degree programs are offered by a vast majority of colleges and universities, and the number of offering continues to grow. Whehter you are searching for an associate, bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate, there’s a good chance you can earn your degree online from a respectable online college.
If you interested in an online bachelor’s degree, check out what the best online colleges offer, or search our online degrees for the exact program that interests you. In either case, you will find well respected colleges and universities that offer online degrees.
If you think a liberal arts college may be a better fit for you, see our ranking of the best liberal arts colleges for a bachelor’s in anthropology.
The people affiliated with a school are ultimately what make it great. This is why we rank the best colleges and universities based on what we call “Influence”.
The influence of a college or university is based on the schools’ top academic influencers related to the discipline in this ranking. We track the influence of faculty and alumni affialiate with these school counting not only the publicaitons and citations of the school’s affiliated people, but we also consider the overall web presense of the faculty and alumni. The greater the citations, authority of web links, web searches, and pageviews, the greater the individuals’ influence. Those combined make up the departments’ influence in the field of study. We believe tracking the academic influence of the people affiliated with a school is the best indicator of academic excellence.
If you are serious about finding the best colleges and universities, you should be asking where the most influential professors are teaching, and whether their graduates themselves are advancing the school’s reputation for academic excellence. Most ranking sites rely on an opaque combination of reputation surveys and misuesed performance metrics. Influence, as measured by our InfluenceRanking engine, provides a ranking that is more insulated from manipulation, and more reflective of real-world educational outcomes.
Tuition + fees
$54K
Acceptance
5%
Graduation
98%
Student body
25K
Median SAT/ACT
1515/34
View profile
Harvard University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$59K
Acceptance
7%
Graduation
96%
Student body
13K
Median SAT/ACT
1535/34
View profile
University of Chicago’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$56K
Acceptance
5%
Graduation
95%
Student body
15K
Median SAT/ACT
1505/33
View profile
Stanford University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$58K
Acceptance
7%
Graduation
96%
Student body
16K
Median SAT/ACT
1515/34
View profile
Yale University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$14K
Acceptance
17%
Graduation
92%
Student body
43K
Median SAT/ACT
1430/33
View profile
University of California, Berkeley’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$61K
Acceptance
7%
Graduation
96%
Student body
28K
Median SAT/ACT
1505/34
View profile
Columbia University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$60K
Acceptance
9%
Graduation
96%
Student body
28K
Median SAT/ACT
1505/34
View profile
University of Pennsylvania’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$17K
Acceptance
26%
Graduation
93%
Student body
45K
Median SAT/ACT
1435/32
View profile
University of Michigan’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$58K
Acceptance
8%
Graduation
96%
Student body
15K
Median SAT/ACT
1525/34
View profile
Duke University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$49K
Acceptance
6%
Graduation
98%
Student body
7K
Median SAT/ACT
1515/34
View profile
Princeton University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$13K
Acceptance
14%
Graduation
91%
Student body
45K
Median SAT/ACT
1415/32
View profile
University of California, Los Angeles’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$59K
Acceptance
11%
Graduation
95%
Student body
26K
Median SAT/ACT
1480/33
View profile
Cornell University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$61K
Acceptance
8%
Graduation
95%
Student body
10K
Median SAT/ACT
1505/34
View profile
Brown University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$59K
Acceptance
9%
Graduation
95%
Student body
19K
Median SAT/ACT
1495/34
View profile
Northwestern University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$55K
Acceptance
21%
Graduation
88%
Student body
49K
Median SAT/ACT
1440/32
View profile
New York University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$54K
Acceptance
11%
Graduation
94%
Student body
26K
Median SAT/ACT
1510/34
View profile
Johns Hopkins University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$53K
Acceptance
7%
Graduation
96%
Student body
14K
Median SAT/ACT
1540/35
View profile
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$57K
Acceptance
16%
Graduation
94%
Student body
13K
Median SAT/ACT
1520/34
View profile
Washington University in St. Louis’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$60K
Acceptance
16%
Graduation
92%
Student body
40K
Median SAT/ACT
1445/32
View profile
University of Southern California’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$19K
Acceptance
23%
Graduation
94%
Student body
25K
Median SAT/ACT
1430/32
View profile
University of Virginia’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Acceptance
31%
Graduation
89%
Student body
47K
Median SAT/ACT
1390/30
View profile
University of Florida’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$54K
Acceptance
19%
Graduation
90%
Student body
13K
Median SAT/ACT
1445/32
View profile
Emory University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$54K
Acceptance
12%
Graduation
93%
Student body
11K
Median SAT/ACT
1510/34
View profile
Vanderbilt University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$59K
Acceptance
9%
Graduation
95%
Student body
7K
Median SAT/ACT
1500/33
View profile
Dartmouth College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$11K
Acceptance
32%
Graduation
88%
Student body
44K
Median SAT/ACT
1355/30
View profile
University of Texas at Austin’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
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