Our department was founded in 1889, and our faculty and students continue to lead social science in exciting new directions.
As a Big Ten program, our students engage with research focused on solving real-world problems. Faculty collaborate with each other and with people across disciplines, including computer science, psychology, anthropology, political science, criminology, biology, neuroscience, medicine, public health, art, marketing, and business.
Our faculty also work with community stakeholders and community-based non-profit organizations. These collaborations lead our faculty and students to ask and answer interesting questions. Check out our recent research, including open-access versions of faculty and student publications, to discover how sociology faculty are tackling issues in drug use; pornography addiction; social networks; homelessness; delinquency; domestic violence; survey questionnaire design and polling; minority health disparities; science identity; sexualities and LGBTQ+ rights; religion and politics; hate crime reporting; and sociology pedagogy among many others.
We are committed to equipping undergraduate students with the critical thinking and analytical skills that put them on the path to meaningful and rewarding careers. Alumni have launched their careers with community organizations such as Voice of Hope, Community Learning Centers, and Teach for America; government agencies like the Department of Agriculture, the state legislature, and law enforcement; and private sector businesses such as HUDL, Talent+, Gallup, NelNet, and insurance companies. Our undergraduate students also go on to law school, medical school and professional programs in the health fields, or to complete an MBA or graduate programs in sociology or related disciplines.
Our MA and PhD students can specialize in the sociology of health, families, social inequalities, or research methodology, benefiting from a small student-to-faculty ratio. We train graduate students for both traditional academic jobs at colleges and universities, as well as work in the public and private sector. We have a long tradition of training students for successful placements at non-academic positions, including think tanks, research organizations, government agencies, non-profit service organizations, and for-profit organizations.
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Department Facts
- Nebraska sociology is in the top 10% of Ph.D. sociology programs according to the NRC S-Rankings (13th in the PhDs.org ranking, NRC 90% confidence range of 6-19)
- Nebraska Sociology is in the top 5% of sociology programs for graduate student support and outcomes (2nd in the PhDs.org ranking, NRC 90% confidence range of 1-7)
On September 28, 2010, the National Research Council (NRC) released its first review of U.S. graduate programs since 1995. This report provides rankings for many disciplines, including those from 117 Ph.D. programs in the sociology category. The NRC report provides aggregate ratings for the Ph.D. programs. The 2010 NRC program rankings are reported in terms of 90% confidence ranges. The website PhDs.org uses the rankings distribution data to provide rank-ordering of programs based on centroid scores.