If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in international relations & national security, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #58 in the country in terms of popularity. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 7 schools in the Southwest 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 266 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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 account for this we consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best International Relations & National Security Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region list to help you make the college decision.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
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Baylor University is a wonderful choice for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in international relations & national security. Located in the medium-sized city of Waco, Baylor 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 an average of $37,507 for their early career.
It's difficult to beat Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University - Prescott if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in international relations & national security. Located in the city of Prescott, Embry-Riddle Prescott is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
International Relations & National Security bachelor's degree recipients from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University - Prescott get an earnings boost of around $11,206 above the average earnings of international relations & national security majors.
The University of Texas at San Antonio is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in international relations & national security. UTSA is a very large public university located in the city of San Antonio.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the international relations program report average early career income of $25,879.
Northern Arizona University is a great option for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in international relations & national security. NAU is a fairly large public university located in the city of Flagstaff.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the international relations program report average early career income of $29,924.
Located in the small city of San Angelo, Angelo State is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Those international relations & national security students who get their bachelor's degree from Angelo State University earn $17,584 more than the typical international relations grad.
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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
