<p>What are the best computer science universities in the West coast? </p>
<p>Obvious man sez Berkeley and Stanford.</p>
<p>CalTech, USC, UCSD, and UW (Washington) all have great programs too. </p>
<p>UCLA, UCI</p>
<p>The reputations of most CS departments are based on their graduate and research programs, and it’s very hard to differentiate undergraduate CS programs. A data structures class at Stanford isn’t going to be that much different from a data structures class at Sacramento State. CS is a field where what you learn depends more on your own efforts than what school you’re going to.</p>
<p>From watching its streaming classes, it looks like Berkeley has huge freshman and sophomore CS classes. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend a smaller school like Santa Clara over Berkeley for many potential students.</p>
<p>Not all UCs have large CS classes. I checked UCSD and max class size is 200, max freshman class size is limited to 200. Here is what I found out about UCSD.</p>
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<p>And search this website for class size for CSE, most classes(95%) are under 200, with a very rare few over 200.
<a href=“Web Login Service - Stale Request”>http://cape.ucsd.edu/responses/Results.aspx</a></p>
<p>So the bottom line is to check out each individual school that you are interested.</p>
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<p>Actually, there are some places where schools can differ in CS.</p>
<p>Lower division courses: more selective schools may put the introductory material into fewer courses or credits than less selective schools, due to assumptions about how quickly students can learn the material. Also, in general, there are varying ways of organizing the lower division course material, including choice of computer languages (some schools use several computer languages as needed in the lower division courses, while others do most or all work in one; the former is likely preferable).</p>
<p>Upper division courses: good CS departments will offer the typical “core” upper division CS courses like operating systems, networks, databases, compilers, security and cryptography, algorithms and complexity, theory of computation, digital systems, computer architecture. Elective offerings beyond that can vary, although artificial intelligence and graphics are common because they are popular. Weaker CS departments may have limited offerings.</p>
<p>However, good CS departments can be found at a wide range of schools, not just “top N” (for small N) schools (and some “top N” schools in general prestige have relatively weak CS departments).</p>
<p>ucb, you mentioned a good point. Some schools start out with C++ as the first language(UCLA is one), for others start out with Java as the first language(UCSD), Python for UCI and possibly UCB(not 100% sure).<br>
Elective classes are what you should also focus on selecting CS departments, that is why looking for the strength of CS graduate department is also helpful.
I know mine has to take lots of elective classes, not just one or two. She mentioned to me she liked Cryptography(more math) and not AI, she was in luck because UCSD, her school is pretty good in Cryptography, especially next to Qualcomm.</p>
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<p>To me, 200 students is huge for a CS class. When I was getting my CS degree, the largest classes I had might have been around 25 or 30 students.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus, you’re talking about how classes are arranged, which I (and likely most employers) believe is irrelevant. It’s the course content that matters. For CS, the quality of course content, and what gets covered, won’t differ much between schools.</p>
<p>Harvey Mudd is an LAC that specializes more in the sciences. Pretty good at CS, too.</p>
<p>@gatomas what is your purpose for asking. Just passing interest? If you are a Jr and searching for colleges provide some information about yourself to get suggestions. As you may gather there are any number of colleges you can get an excellent CS education, you should consider other factors too as well as where you are ‘likely’.</p>
<p>If you are not a Jr yet, which it seems, I suggest you do some reading about the various colleges over all and look into how the dept is run, compare programs and graduation requirements. Look at costs, not the COA necessarily, but the cost to you and your family. If you will be full pay or eligible for aid and find out what your parents plan to pay each year.</p>
<p>@DrGoogle you probably know but UCSD has a very prominent crypto research group. A student from my daughter’s college is earning her PhD from there and has a faculty position lined up and I have seen her quoted in the press in her specialization, a hot topic.</p>
<p>@BrownParent, thanks for your comment, I’ve been reading on the internet to find out more about its strength and that is what I’ve read so far but not extensively.</p>
<p>@simba9, that is the max of some introductory classes, a lot of classes are smaller, some upper division are like 30+ students per class, particularly the electives. I think I was trying to contrast it with Berkeley where I’ve heard it’s 1000+ students per intro class and Stanford where it has 600+ students per intro class.
I also checked USC class schedule, see link below here and would you believe USC has at least one class out of 260 and some of these classes seem like upper level classes so that is why it’s even more baffling to me, why such a large class size. But the numbers I’ve seen frequently when I made a quick glance(not sure if it’s average or not) is about 70 to 80 students.</p>
<p><a href=“Classes Offered · USC Schedule of Classes”>Classes Offered · USC Schedule of Classes;
<p>CSCI 101: 70
CSCI 109: 220
CSCI 201: 75
CSCI 280: 80
CSCI 357: 80
CSCI 455x: 160
CSCI 477a: 135
CSCI 510: 120
CSCI 555: 80
CSCI 561: 330
CSCI 570: 260
CSCI 571: 150
CSCI 576: 100
CSCI 577a: 120
CSCI 585: 120
CSCI 588: 150</p>