Is the University of Michigan or George Washington University better for international relations majors?

The biggest practical tradeoff is academic depth versus location-driven access. Michigan offers a broader environment with excellent political science, economics, language study, and area studies, while George Washington places you in Washington, DC, where internships, policy events, embassies, and international organizations are part of everyday student life. For international relations, both can work very well, but they build your experience in different ways.

At Michigan, international relations is supported by a very strong overall university ecosystem. You get a large research university with deep faculty strength across political science, public policy, history, regional studies, and quantitative methods, which matters if you want a rigorous foundation or might later consider grad school. Michigan also tends to have more breadth in course options.

GW’s edge is that the city is effectively part of the classroom. If you want semester-time internships with think tanks, federal agencies, NGOs, advocacy groups, or embassies, GW makes that unusually easy. The Elliott School is one of the school’s major draws, and for students who want policy exposure early, that structure and proximity can be a real advantage rather than just a nice extra.

For international relations specifically, GW is more specialized and more directly plugged into the professional world of the field. That can make the undergraduate experience feel more targeted from day one.

My view is that GW has the more immediately IR-centered setup, especially if you care about internships and policy networks during college. Michigan is the stronger choice if you want the most robust all-around academic platform and the flexibility to explore IR through multiple disciplines at a very high level.