Cornell or MIT for Computer Science and Engineering

Got into both. Full pay at both. Which one to choose?

Computer Science and Engineering? Go to MIT, of course! But how can you know you get full pay at Cornell while they haven’t released RD results? Did you get accepted at ED?

@meowmeowwww I got LL from Cornell. And I don’t qualify for financial aid so I have to pay full price at any of them.

@Alamalaki I would choose MIT, of course. Better in your field of interest and stronger all-around name recognition, prestige/wow-factor. Also Boston>>>>>>Ithaca.

^^ agreed. MIT, no question.

Is this a real question? Cornell is great but MIT is THE engineering school…

MIT will give you immortality.

MIT

I’m not trying to bash on Cornell but come on… Any person in the right mind would pick MIT over Cornell for CS/Engineering.

Cornell is beautiful, but you can ski New Hampshire. MIT CS is really a unique show that you have a ticket to…

Uh… maybe this is a troll question. But EECS @ MIT is top ranked for very very good reasons. While I’m sure Cornell is just as great, they aren’t in the same leagues as far as employment opportunities/research/course selection in EECS go.

At the very top of the scale – Putnam participant level – MIT beats Cornell, absolutely. But for the vast majority of us mortals, neither the Cornell CS nor the MIT CS undergraduate experience dominates. You can come out ahead with either, but in different ways. This is even true at the graduate level. It was Cornell, not MIT, that poached Morrisett from Harvard CS.

Then it comes down to second-order effects: Cambridge vs Ithaca, campus feel (very different), housing arrangements, and very importantly, how you like the general academic requirements, which are quite restrictive but in different ways in both places (MIT’s GIRs read worse than they look but can still be annoying if you don’t like them), and even the specific CS requirements (MIT’s Course 6 --even the CS track – still has more hardware emphasis than Cornell’s CS).