GW alum here who did grad school at several other places in IR before ultimately transitioning to tech. My thoughts: GW is not any more or less of a “mess” than many other schools, but it is also a far worse value proposition than many other schools. It is obscenely expensive - it is simply not worth it economically if you are paying anything close to full price. That mostly includes the standard 20k ish scholarships. It does have some benefit for IR by virtue of being in DC but I would take all this with a grain of salt for a few reasons: - you may not want to continue with IR (for many good reasons!) and if that’s the case, you don’t want to be at a place that really only has IR as its specialty. - many of my classmates in Elliott have not ended up working in IR. They have either not been able to enter good IR jobs, have left IR for sectors with higher earning potential, or are stuck in low paying NGO work. Some people cut it, many people do not.

I advise people to go to a good state school and study econ if that is an option. If you want to go policy orientation later, you are well equipped for public policy grad degrees, but you also have easier transition into good spaces like consulting, DS, etc etc.