@Mastadon
Thanks for all the Tufts info, good to know!
@twogirls @aquapt
Big thanks for all the thoughtful advice and information, it really helps me a lot.
Just an update. Updated costs of attendance is below, new advice would be great. I hope to decide in the next few days.
UNC Chapel Hill - 52k
Tufts - 52k
Northeastern - 38k
@NyuLeg19 , how did you get the cost down. Did you do an appeal ?
Three great options. Northeastern University makes sense due to your intended major & low cost & location.
With respect to relative quality of CS programs:
The head of the entire college of computing at NEU is a former professor at Tufts. Would it make sense to recruit a professor into a much higher position setting the direction for a much larger program if the department they were part of was less highly regarded?
The current head of the CS department at Tufts was one of the 4 finalists to head up the entire college of computing at Georgia Tech - which is probably one of the top academic CS positions in the country.
The current head of the CS department at Tufts was a member of the 2013 ACM/IEEE committee that developed the curriculum standards for college CS programs. (the standards are reset every 10 years or so).
In the last 10 years, Tufts has won 15 Microsoft undergraduate research awards, Northeastern has won 1. Normalizing for the relative size of the departments, the ratio is much higher.
Likewise for NSF CS undergraduate research awards.
With respect to location:
Tufts has a better location for computer science - Cambridge (i.e. MIT) and the Red Line is the center of the tech corridor in Boston. Between Tufts, MIT and Harvard, there are more tech oriented activities in this area than around Northeastern.
It is somewhat common for Tufts students to continue to work for companies during the school year after a summer internship because of their close proximity. Tufts also gives academic credit for faculty supervised internships during the school year. About 90% of Tufts students have internships, about 70% have two or more. About 70% also do research.
The fact that there are many jobs close to Tufts’ actually negates most of any perceived advantage of the COOP program. Tufts reports higher median salaries than Northeastern despite the fact that students go to school a year longer, and Tufts has a much smaller percentage of professional majors.
When you factor in the opportunity cost of one year’s lost salary, Northeastern will probably be more expensive than Tufts.
- The Dean of Northeastern's College of Computer Science was the Chair of the Department of Computer Science. So Northeastern hired away your chair to be the Dean of our equivalent college. NU hired her away in 2014 and she just signed onto a 2nd term.
- Dean Broadley has brought in a $50M naming gift for the college and just pulled in a $4M grant from Facebook to spread their intellectual property around MA's in Computer Science for non-CS BA's to Columbia, UIUC, and Georgia Tech (as you mentioned one of the leaders in computer science). They obviously see something worthwhile in that IP and what NU is doing in the area of computer science
- Northeastern in closer to MIT than Tufts via public transportation, walking, and is about half the time driving.Those businesses are certainly in Kendall, they are less often in Harvard Square, they are almost non-existent in Medford. NU has much better access downtown where many have moved for cheap rent and certainly the Seaport.
- You are undervaluing debt loads impact families, both in terms of how easy they are to pay off and in terms of stress to the person that takes them on. If the OP is getting a loan for the $15K difference that $60K from 4 years can turn into $120K by the time they pay it off. Not everyone find school is for them, what happens if they take on all these extra loans to go to Tufts and then pursue a different career?
- NU gives credit for internships as well. That is in addition to co-op.
- Why would location specific (which I talked about in #3) negate advantage of co-op? A significant number of students don't do co-ops in Boston. You can go work for Apple in the Bay Area, Amazon in Seattle, you can work at GE down the road. It has little to do with taking advantage of geographic proximity and everything about building relationships and learning more about fields you may want to work in (or learn that you dont) and learning about oneself.
- Tufts has 12 CS faculty. Northeastern has 59 according to csrankings.org
8.Tufts is a great school. Northeastern is a great school. Why cant they both be great? In this case one costs a bunch more to a student at least somewhat worried about debt.
Yeah I’m sorry but location is not an advantage between Tufts/Northeastern given how many co-op’s Northeastern has all over the city in the tech world as well as all over the world. As mentioned, getting to Kendall is the same amount of time form both schools, if not less from Northeastern from the 1 bus line.
Again, so many co-op’s are all over the US. Northeastern is one of the top 25 most present degrees in Silicon Valley’s top tech companies new grads, which its location in Boston has nothing to do with.
If you want to look at the research, Northeastern is very well represented at the top CS conferences, much more so that Tufts:
If I’m choosing a place to study CS in Boston today, Northeastern comes in over Tufts but both come in very well above others such as BU and Harvard for me. They are close enough that I would be focusing on fit/cost here primarily though, but if it really came down to purely CS strength, Northeastern all the way for sure. For research above as mentioned, and for the teaching approach detailed below:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Thoughts/Developing_Developers.html
This approach was developed by people at Northeastern and has been adapted by notable CS names such as Waterloo and Brown as well as UChicago, Northwestern, WPI, U of Utah and others.
First, you can always choose to do 4 years and 2 co-op’s. When you consider that doing 3 co-op’s in 5 years means 18 months of around $30 an hour, there’s little to no opportunity cost lost. That extra year means 90K in co-op pay for a CS major, around where average CS salaries will be for both schools.
You are really splitting hairs here. The campuses are about 4 miles apart.
Chapel Hill (while definitely not Boston) is not in “the middle of nowhere”. It is in RTP which is one of the fastest growing metropolitan cities in the US. Plus Chapel Hill might be top 3 best college towns in the country and as such your overall school experience (academics, social, volunteering, clubs, sports, etc) will be really good. All a amazing schools but UNC will truly offer you best of everything in a smaller scale compared to Boston or NYC