I have decided to go back for my second Bachelor’s degree in CS to compliment my B.A. in Mathematics. I have started coding in different languages and read some books and researched a lot of different programs and decided that I would like to go into a field in Software Engineering. I am currently looking at the University of Florida for a B.S. in Computer Science; however, the program is not ABET accredited. I saw the same program at Florida State University and the program is ABET accredited. The UofF has a high ranking (#47 U.S. News, #83 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), #83 Forbes, #22 Washington Monthly, #80 Lumosity) and the reputation seems to be largely respected. I like Florida State University as well but the schools overall ranking is lower than that of the University of Florida (#96 U.S. News, #201 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), #211 Forbes, #69 Washington Monthly, #174 Lumosity) and tuition is a little bit more expensive (albeit $100+ more but still). I don’t know much about FSU’s reputation but I hear that it is good too. I wanted to know if getting a PE license is important a person is interested in Computer Programming, Cyber Security, Software Engineering, etc. I really like the program outline at the University of Florida but the lack of ABET accreditation is what’s holding me back at this point. Florida State University’s program is acceptable too but I don’t want to spend the extra money if ABET accreditation doesn’t really matter all too much. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
For CS, accreditation and ranking aren’t that important. Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon and plenty of other good CS programs aren’t accredited. And never in my 30+ years of doing software has the issue of CS rankings ever been discussed at work.
ABET accreditation sets a minimum standard, but a non-ABET-accredited CS major can be good (e.g. Stanford, CMU, Berkeley L&S CS). You may have to do a greater level of your own inspection (perhaps with someone familiar with CS) to evaluate a non-ABET-accredited CS major to be sure that it is suitable (has the usually-expected course offerings at reasonable frequency and such).
The main use of ABET accreditation in CS appears to be as a prerequisite for the patent exam, although someone with a non-ABET-accredited CS degree with the course work listed in the patent exam prerequisites can also take the patent exam. Both ABET accreditation for CS and the patent exam prerequisites do require some non-CS science course work, which is not always required in CS major degree programs.