Amen. You can always form your own ranking by making a spreadsheet featuring schools of interest (at any point in the process, pre- or post-admittance…) and scores for the variables that are important to you. Could be location/weather, cost, academics (majors and courses, curriculum), food and dorms, culture/sports/Greek vibe – whatever you deem important. Total up the scores and sort by the total. That’s your relevant ranking.
If you can’t decide between some of the schools that accept you, definitely visit. I would also suggest visiting a school before considering an ED application.
The availability of graduate level courses for undergraduates can be useful for the most advanced undergraduates, but most undergraduates do not fit that description. Math is the most common subject where incoming frosh are highly advanced, but even in math, frosh in graduate level courses are rare.
Obviously, the highly advanced student needs to consider such things, but even on these forums, such students are not the norm.
Do you have a reference for that or is it just conjecture? Having watched my very advanced kid go through Mechanical Engineering and take graduate classes as an undergrad in third year, I would say that there are hardly any, anywhere taking masters and above level classes in their second year.
About 200 kids declare CS at my son’s college. There are probably 15-20 kids registering for grad level CS classes starting 3rd semester. In the math department I’ve heard of kids starting freshman year and taking graduate level math classes, but smaller numbers. The graduating class has 30-40 kids in math, and I am guessing 3-5 kids are at that level – in this case, a home schooled kid from North Carolina, some IMO kids from Romania etc. By the third semester some of the Math kids were also crossing over into TCS. It’s probably not more than a class every semester. By the time he is done with 8 semester, my son may have had somewhere between 6 and 8 grad classes either in TCS or Math. Maybe 4 semesters of guided research apart from that. I wouldn’t be surprised if MIT CS and MIT Math were similar. Mech is of course different. There are long pre-req chains. Princeton tries very hard to get kids to the leaf of a subfield quickly so that they can engage in research if they choose to.
My comment was before the OP posted his list if you go back and look, as a general matter. Kids may prefer various schools for a variety of reasons. Once the OP posted his list the discussion very quickly became focused on his list.
Outside of math, I expect there are extremely few students who need to take graduate level courses to be content with their studies, as a freshman/sophomore. Even in math, I expect the number is extremely small. For example, in the Harvard freshman survey 4.6% of students indicated a higher HS math level than MV calculus/linear algebra. These classes are usually considered freshman/sophomore year math. Taking a freshman/sophomore level math class during HS is not the same as exhausting all interesting undergrad math courses, but it suggests that the portion needing grad classes to be content is extremely small, even for math at Harvard.
There are some fields for which graduate courses often have few/no prerequisites, so some students may choose to register for them because they sound more interesting than alternative undergraduate courses, but that is a different from needing the classes to be content with their studies. I expect that is the more common case for CS.
I majored in EE, which often had courses cross listed in CS at my college. In sophomore year, nearly everyone took the same intro EE classes, but as a junior or senior, many students chose 200 level classes for some of their EE cores or EE electives major requirements. 200 level is described as “courses for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students.” The issue wasn’t that they had exhausted all the available EE classes or were at too high a level to appreciate undergrad EE classes. It was more that they chose what class sounded most interesting and/or fit best with their goals, which happened to be a 200 level class instead of 100 level. I expect this is the more common reason for choosing CS grad classes as well.
One related consideration when choosing a college is number of courses you find interesting, in in your desired field and subfield (including both available undergrad and grad classes). Smaller colleges may offer limited offerings in less popular majors. The upside is classes in unpopular majors are often quite small. At the college I attended, CS classes regularly had enrollments of hundreds. At some smaller classes, most CS classes have enrollment of under 20 kids, and max size for intro freshman classes is ~50.
We are not saying radically different things. Some kids want to take classes that are usually in the grad curriculum. They will pick colleges that will allow them this freedom. Not to tell people they are taking a grad class. But for example, to take all the classes offered by Noga Alon before they graduate. Or whichever prof catches their fancy. And maybe they’ll go to grad school in that field. It is not for us to question why, and can’t they just make do etc
That was my experience. I didn’t start college as an “advanced” student. I simply got excited about certain topics and professors and took grad classes because they were available and interesting. After taking some of these classes, I ended up being a TA for a grad class in AI when I was a senior. Of course AI is more advanced now and would likely have more prereq chains, but I am sure that there are still plenty of areas where a motivated student can advance quickly, and also many students now enter college with a staggering amount of CS background. I was at Stanford.
No one else has Noga Alon, but MANY schools that do not offer doctoral programs, do offer graduate level coursework. A few notable ones that don’t offer classes that would be graduate work elsewhere as part of their undergraduate curriculum. HMC would be one such example.
Stanford is unique in that in the most recent available years, >40% of undergraduate CS majors did a co-terminal masters degree in which they simultaneously pursued a BS and MS degree in CS. This leads to a lot of CS students who identify as undergrads taking 200+ level CS courses.
Among students who are not co-terms and are only doing a bachelors, the majority of the listed electives students may choose from for the CS degree are 200+ level courses. Many of the CS depth tracks also require 200+ level courses. For example, you mentioned the AI track. Nearly all of the required classes for the AI depth track are 200+ level. So many non-coterms CS students are also taking 200+ level courses.
As I noted earlier, Stanford defines 200-299 level as either advanced undergrad or graduate, rather than having a strict division between undergrad and graduate courses. In a 200+ level CS course you’ll often see a good number of undergrads, co-terms, graduates, and sometimes industry professionals… all taking the same class.
I don’t mean to suggest this is good or bad, only that Stanford is different than most other colleges. These types of differences are something to consider when choosing a college. I also don’t mean to suggest being a “best” CS college requires having access to a substantial number of graduate courses or making it easy to obtain a co-terminal master’s degree along with bachelor’s. There are many excellent colleges with few graduate classes, and CS grads tend to have great outcomes from such colleges. Far more important is whether the college offers a sufficient number of classes that you want to take and offers a good path to the degree(s) you want to obtain.
This isn’t quite true. UW Seattle yield protects. I got into several UCs + waitlisted at Ivy/CMU type schools but denied direct to CS.
P.S. @KillKam They often do this do very strong students like yourself because they end up going out of state anyways. If you appeal your decision with a well-crafted, convincing appeals letter, you have a decent shot of getting in. I was eventually admitted via this pathway, but I still turned my UW CS offer down for an OOS school for quality of life and personal growth reasons (and given the opportunity to do it all again I would have chose my current school in a heartbeat).
UW has a 3% admit rate for out of state CS. With a 3% admit rate and emphasis on many non-stat criteria including a “personal score”, I wouldn’t assume a rejection must be yield protection.
CS, probably more than any other major, spans a wide sprectrum of subfields/specialties, even though the majority of CS graduates currently end up working in software development because of the near insatiable demand (until recently) and good pay in that sector. Is your interest in software development or something else within CS? If it’s the former, your choice of schools matters much less. If it’s the latter, you need to be more careful in choosing your schools. Different schools have different strengths in the depth of courses and/or research opportunities in each specialty or subspecialty.
But it was kind of weird at that age, being a TA for these grown-up industry professional types. A fellow TA told me that they were paying big bucks to take the course. Or their company was paying so that they could take it.
