a bachelor's degree in international relations & national security is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #58 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 32 schools in the Middle Atlantic Region to determine which ones were the best for international relations & national security students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 2,563 bachelor's degrees in international relations & national security during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great International Relations & National Security School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of international relations & national security for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to international relations & national security students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of international relations & national security students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt international relations & national security students go into to obtain their bachelor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized international relations & national security related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for international relations & national security students working on their bachelor's degree.
The international relations school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best International Relations & National Security Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in international relations & national security has to look into Johns Hopkins University. Located in the large city of Baltimore, Johns Hopkins is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the international relations program make around $44,004 for their early career.
It is difficult to beat George Washington University if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in international relations & national security. Located in the city of Washington, GWU is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
International Relations & National Security bachelor's degree recipients from George Washington University get an earnings boost of around $10,633 over the average earnings of international relations & national security majors.
Georgetown University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in international relations & national security. Georgetown is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Washington.
International Relations & National Security bachelor's degree recipients from Georgetown University get an earnings boost of about $8,288 over the average earnings of international relations & national security graduates.
It is difficult to beat American University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in international relations & national security. Located in the city of Washington, The American University is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the international relations & national security program at American University earn $5,251 above the standard college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
UPenn is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Philadelphia.
Those international relations & national security students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Pennsylvania earn $23,259 more than the typical international relations grad.
Fordham U is a large private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Bronx.
Bachelor's recipients from the international relations & national security major at Fordham University earn $4,353 more than the typical graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
Your choice of international relations & national security for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
