College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences is the university's largest college with 17 departments and seven centers that span the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. 

• The Master of Public Administration program is ranked fifth nationally in the specialty field of city management and urban policy and 12th in the specialty of public finance and budgeting by U.S. News and World Report.


• The graduate program in the anthropology department conferred more master's degrees than any other program in Illinois from 2009-2010.


• NIU's anthropology program is one of only 27 programs in the country that belongs to the Consortium of Practicing and Applied Anthropology Programs.
  
  
• The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was ranked by The American Chemical Society (ACS) among the top universities for the number of ACS-certified bachelor’s degrees awarded annually. 


• The Department of Communication was ranked by the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship as a "top 10 research department" in seven research specialties in 2010 and noted "research strengths" in an additional seventeen specialties. 
  
  
• The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures is one of the largest foreign language departments in the country, offering instruction in 16 languages, including Burmese, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Khmer, Malay, Russian, Tagalog and Thai.


• The geography department was the first program in Illinois to offer a certificate program in GIS and was a key partner in developing the state's first Certificate in Homeland Security program.


• The Department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences has the largest B.S. and M.S. and second-largest Ph.D. programs in geology of all public universities in Illinois and is highly ranked among comparable institutions throughout the nation.


• The geosciences program is ranked among the top 100 hydrogeology programs in the country by the National Ground Water Association. 


• The Department of Philosophy is ranked second nationwide by the Philosophical Gourmet Report among philosophy departments offering terminal master’s degree programs.


• Over the most recent five-year period for which data are available from the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE), the Department of Philosophy was the largest producer of M.A. degrees in philosophy of all public universities in Illinois. Moreover, the program is the largest producer of graduate degrees in philosophy of all public universities in Illinois, as well.


• The Department of Political Science is known nationally for its longstanding strength in the history of political philosophy from Plato to the present. The success of the Ph.D. program in political theory is indicated by the many dissertations that have been published as books, an excellent record of graduate placement and hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarship aid received from the Earhart Foundation since the early 1970s. As a recipient of these fellowships, NIU enjoys the company of Harvard University, Yale University and the University of Chicago. 


• At the graduate level, NIU boasts the only political science program in the country that offers politics and the life sciences (or biopolitics) as a distinct field of graduate study.


• The graduate program in physics, with close ties to Argonne and Fermi national laboratories, has over 70 students and receives over three million dollars in external funding annually.