Different classes can have very different grade distributions and grading systems. In my Stanford Chem 30 something example earlier, a grade in 30/100 was a B grade (don’t recall if it was B+ or B). While in the vast majority of classes, a 30 would have been failing. I wouldn’t assume if 55% = C in one class, the same grading system applies to a midterm from a different class. That said the overall student body at Purdue has an average GPA slightly below 3.0, so there are indeed a lot of students getting below B, much more than at CMU, Stanford, and similar.
The CS link I posted earlier mentions 58% of the companies that hired BYU CS grads were located in Utah, so if most don’t want to stay in Utah, many of their employment decisions are surprising.
58% of the companies… and if they each hire one BYU student (vs. Accenture hiring 20 and Deloitte hiring 20 and E&Y hiring 20 and GE hiring 10 and Boeing hiring 5 and Pfizer hiring 10)- well, you’re the self proclaimed data guy and presumably you can do the math.
You are making up numbers using many companies that were not on the posted CS hire list. You could also assume that there was only 1 hire at each of the out of state companies and 20 hires at the in state companies, leading to a very different conclusion. I think the more reasonable approach is to not assume there are tremendously larger number of hires per company at in state vs out of state, or vice versa, leading to the original conclusion of a large portion of students choosing to stay in state.
This is consistent with various other surveys about locations of BYU grads. For example, among Payscale members, the percentage of BYU grads working in different states is below, ranked from most to least. A larger portion of Payscale BYU alumni are currently working in Utah than the portion of BYU students originally from Utah, suggesting BYU alumni are more likely to move to Utah than move out of Utah.
Working in Utah – 49%
Working in CA – 12%
Working in WA – 7%
Working in TX – 5%
Thanks for the heads-up. UIUC isn’t fooling around.
My nephew doesn’t seem to be interested in the hardware side of things. To me, it seems like he’s quite good in the more theoretical CS stuff - pretty much pure discrete math - versus the “code an app” side of things. I think he’ll do well in a theoretically oriented curriculum. I could even see him as a math major.
I’m definitely going to talk to him about this. Since I could also see him majoring in math, science, or even economics, one idea is to sidestep the whole “CS hurdle” problem and apply as more of an “undecided but STEM-y” kid to some schools that fit the “Brown profile” - very good schools that have a good CS program, but are generally known for their good all-round liberal arts education. Based on what he’s said, I think he might be happier at a school like that than a bigger UIUC type school.
I’ve tried to google some statistics about admit rates into the CS major at schools that admit by major so that I could compare these rates to overall college and/or engineering admit rates. No luck. I even tried schools like CMU and Georgia Tech that have a separate school for their CS programs. Does anyone know of any similar statistics that are out there?
He might also want to look at applied math majors or applied math concentrations within math majors.
Note that it is much harder to get in to UIUC CS than to stay in once you’re in. It’s not like they kick out CS majors with less than a 3.67 GPA (or anything above academic probation).
In general, the elite privates will offer more flexibility when it comes to majoring. Most won’t force him to decide on a major before the start of sophomore year.
The CS admit rates are anecdotal. For CMU, it’s something like 5%.
At Penn, CS is the largest major in the Engineering school (SEAS). I am told that the SEAS admit rate is in the 7 to 8% range. That would seem to be in line with what PurpleTitan is saying.
At Penn, you need to be very good at math to major in CS. You basically have a math minor buried in the CS requirements for calculus, discrete math, linear algebra, and statistics. I think that you only have to take one additional math class to add a math minor. You will see a lot of CS majors with a math minor and a lot of math majors with a CS minor.They fit together well.
This is likely due to the school being wealthy enough that it can maintain sufficient reserve capacity in each major to take all interested students (at least those who can pass the prerequisites), sometimes by having a smaller number of students overall than the departmental capacity of every major can accommodate. Changing popularity of different majors can happen more quickly than faculty hiring and departure, so the reserve capacity is used to buffer the demand for majors.
Other schools, including public ones, do not want to waste any capacity, so they enroll their campuses and majors to the limit. This can mean high GPA requirements or competitive admission processes to get into popular majors.
He should look closely at the programs of various schools. As @DrGoogle notes, high ranking tech firm members come from all kinds of colleges and universities. So he should find a program that’s going to give him the experience he would most enjoy and has the courses and research areas that intrigue him. Do they have strong programs for his interests outside of computing? Languages? (We passed on a couple of tech colleges for lack of languages.) Sports?History? The marketing allure or MIT and Stanford are irresistible, yeah got it. Maybe he gets in an loves it. I’m saying there are many places that can launch him to success via a CS major.
Sorry, I meant the start of junior year at many privates. And yes, many privates have “excess capacity” (though with CS being so popular these days, some of the CS classes at a place like Stanford or even Harvey Mudd are now gigantic).
Note, however, that giant public UW-Madison also provides that flexibility. And it’s a fine school for CS. And it is still shockingly easy to declare for CS there.
Harvey Mudd? Really. What happens to small liberal arts classes?
LACs, when faced with a surge in popularity of specific courses or majors that exceeds their capacity to offer them in faculty-led small class sizes to all students, need to make similar choices that other schools do. I.e. one or more of the following:
- Increase class sizes.
- Not accommodate all interested students.
- Use TAs.
- Use adjuncts.
It does mean that CS popularity among students does not exceed CS department capacity, or at least not by very much. Perhaps Wisconsin just has a relatively large CS department compared to the number of students interested in CS.
Of course, there are other publics where CS is not an impacted major, like most CSUs such as Bakersfield, Channel Islands, Dominguez Hills, East Bay, and Stanislaus. But then it may be that CS is not all that popular at less selective schools, due to its perceived or actual difficulty.
Is a CS major really that “hot” in the job market today? I have no idea. In the long past, this was not the case.
About a decade or so ago (likely after the tech bubble burst), the job prospect of a CS major was not that good. Actually, it was bad enough that, on the news paper , a reporter wrote that some faculty/advisor in the CS deparment told their CS majors that they had better at least pick up a minor so as to improve their chances of being hired after graduation. In other words, the faculty in the CS department believe that having merely solid CS skills is likely not enough to secure a good job. (BTW, this CS department is at our state’s flagship university, not at an unknown university. The graduates from this school’s EE or CS are generally well regarded in industry in general. I knew some of them joined MS, Apple, etc. after graduation. This was before Google became a hot company.)
Hopefully, there will not be “oversupply” of CS majors in a decade or two.
"Is a CS major really that “hot” in the job market today? I have no idea. In the long past, this was not the case.
About a decade or so ago (likely after the tech bubble burst), the job prospect of a CS major was not that good. Actually, it was bad enough that, on the news paper , a reporter wrote that some faculty/advisor in the CS deparment told their CS majors that they had better at least pick up a minor so as to improve their chances of being hired after graduation. In other words, the faculty in the CS department believe that having merely solid CS skills is likely not enough to secure a good job. (BTW, this CS department is at our state’s flagship university, not at an unknown university. The graduates from this school’s EE or CS are generally well regarded in industry in general. I knew some of them joined MS, Apple, etc. after graduation. This was before Google became a hot company.)
Hopefully, there will not be “oversupply” of CS majors in a decade or two.
Post edited by mcat2 at 2:42AM"
I can tell you that my husband has a hard time filling positions for qualified CS people.
The kids who come out of Georgia Tech are in the enviable position of having a lot of companies battle for them. There are plenty of people applying for the positions, but most of them fail the mandatory test that his (fortune 50) company has them take if they get past the interview.
The Tech kids never fail them, but he often doesn’t get them because smaller companies with more salary leeway are able to sweeten the pot more than he can.
So those people who are bemoaning their ability to get a job with a CS degree probably don’t have a degree that involved the required technical chops that many companies are looking for today. Or they’re just not good programmers or developers, and should never have chosen that major.
CS admit rates at CMU aren’t anecdotal. http://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics That 5% number is correct. (The schools vary wildly within CMU from 3% for Drama to over 50% for Architecture.) I assume you mean that it’s hard to figure out how hard it is to get in at places like Berkeley. I don’t think you can use CMU as an example, because CS is regularly tied for first place in the whole country, while the university over all is generally ranked in the mid-20s. I think Berkeley is held in much higher regard overall, while still having a top CS department.
@mcat2, you must not be in the tech industry. Google was already a hot company a decade or so ago.
However, the desirability of CS grads definitely does go through boom/bust cycles.
There are now three times as many concentrators in CS at Harvard as there were five years ago: http://handbook.fas.harvard.edu/book/computer-science. And if I remember correctly when I looked this up when my son was applying there had been about 20 shortly after the dot com bust in the early 2000s. Definitely boom-bust cycles, but I don’t think it will ever bust completely. We are way too dependent on computers.
A CS major (graduating with a relatively good GPA for that school) is a very hot commodity in today’s market. I do some work recruiting and it’s not that easy to find someone who has the right skills and aptitude for the work. There is still a projected shortfall in IT workers (Not just for developers/software engineers) for the next decade. Nearly everything we do these days require some sort of IT support.
It’s a great field for the right people but it’s not for everyone.