Best Universities for Social Sciences in 2012

Preparing to study a social science? Check out the world's best universities in this field, with the 2012 QS World University Rankings by Subject.

Social sciences are subjects which, as the name suggests, aim to study and understand the behaviour of humans en-masse. Though they all start from empirical facts and statistics, the analysis tends to be more akin to a humanities subject than a hard science.

There’s a lot of crossover on both sides though. Mathematics plays a role in economics and accounting; politics stripped down to its core is abstract critical theory. What classes as a social science is not set in stone, and covers a wide range of subjects, though there is a lot of crossover between them.

The subjects that we are classing as social sciences in these rankings are: accounting & finance, communications & media studies, economics, education, law, politics & international relations, sociology and statistics.

View the individual subject rankings >

Best universities to study social sciences: The top tens

Like the overall QS World University Rankings, the rankings are dominated by universities from the US, and to a lesser extent, the UK.

The top ends of the rankings are also dominated by universities from these countries, most featuring familiar faces such as Harvard, which tops five of these rankings.

We see other usual suspects, such as Stanford (which tops two), Oxford, Cambridge and MIT (the final chart topper), appearing consistently in the top ten too.

There are a few subject specific variations, such as the London School of Economics and Political Science unsurprisingly popping up in the subjects in which it specializes. Other examples include the London Business School, which breaks into the top ten for accounting & finance, and Georgia Institute of Technology, which is the world’s sixth best for statistics.

Outside of these two countries, we also see the University of Tokyo, the Australian National University, and Hong Kong University each making the top ten for a subject each.

The University of Melbourne and the National University of Singapore both out do them though, each appearing in the top ten for three of the social science subjects. NUS, which finishes third in communication & media studies, also boasts the highest rank of any non UK/US university.

Best universities to study social sciences: New faces

Of course, these universities are familiar faces, their strength across disciplines affording them their elite statuses.

It’s when we get a bit lower down the tables that the subject rankings come into their own, letting us see where quality can be found in specific disciplines at universities which might not fare so well in the overall rankings.

Many of the rankings include a large proportion of new faces when compared to last year’s results (the communications and media studies rankings and the education rankings are new this year).

The statistics ranking features 37 new universities from 15 different countries, and 22 different countries provide the 50 new universities in the politics ranking.

Law outdoes them in numbers though, featuring a whopping 91 institutions that didn’t make last year’s ranking. 45 of these are US institutions, emphasizing its strength in the discipline, but the other 46 are from a total of 17 countries.

Look through these rankings, in fact, and you’ll see a number of countries you might not have expected to represented. For instance, did you know that one of the world’s best universities for communications & media studies is in Iran, or Egypt boasts a top-150 university in politics?

Best universities to study social sciences: A regional focus

Another three countries that feature in the rankings quite a few times are Chile, Brazil and Mexico, demonstrating the increasing strength of Latin American universities.

And the appearance of Colombia in the economics rankings show that we can perhaps expect this list to widen in the future.

Chile manages six entrants in the law ranking, a figure matched by Brazil in sociology – which with seven universities is also the subject with the largest Latin American contingent.

Though these are relatively small figures, they are impressive for an up and coming region.

Asia has come along in leaps and bounds over the past few years, so it’s unsurprising to see its universities represented well in some subjects, Although it lags behind in a couple, such as sociology in which only seven of the continents’ universities are represented, and politics where the figure is eight.

If it’s communication (37), statistics (40) or accounting & finance (29) you’re interested in though, then universities in Asia might be worth a look.

China does particularly well in statistics, with 12 universities (also noteworthy are the six Indian universities in this ranking), and South Korea does similarly well with 10 in media & communication studies.

As well as this pair, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong all perform impressively, as would be expected, and we also see Malaysian and Thai institutions making an appearance.

Continental Europe provides on average around a sixth to a just under a quarter of institutions in each subject, performing particularly well in politics (46 institutions), economics (48) and statistics (45).

Education is the strong suit of Australia and New Zealand who boast 23 and six institutions respectively in that ranking, followed by communications & media studies. The rankings also reveal that there’s lot more to the former than the Group of Eight!

Canada is well represented throughout, and with 19 universities in the top 200, accounts for nearly one in every 10 institutions in the sociology ranking.

Other than Israel, which unsurprisingly features consistently, South Africa flies the flag for Africa and the Middle East in a number of the rankings, with Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also making an appearance.

So although the Anglo-American status quo largely remains intact for now, it is certainly not guaranteed to stay that way. In fact, from analyzing the QS University Rankings by Subject: Social Sciences and Management, it is clear that quality is by no means limited to these two educational behemoths.

Study a social science subject at university, then, and you certainly will not be short of options!