CS at LACs

College Search & Selection
21

Thank you for the detailed response and the link. Can’t blame them for being unable to offer a wide spectrum of courses in a popular major.

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22

Also look into Hamilton College as another option.

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23

It can sometimes be hard to find the combination of all of the following in a popular major:

  • Small class sizes.
  • Full set of upper level course offerings, with each course offered at a reasonable frequency.
  • No rationing of courses (either lower level courses for undeclared students, or upper level courses for those in the major).
  • No secondary admission to major beyond passing (C or higher grade) the lower level prerequisite courses.
  • No need to apply to the major during frosh admission.
24

Thanks

25

Essentially, it is Caltech, Princeton or Harvard perhaps :-). Even Caltech doesn’t have the breadth. Maybe Harvey Mudd.

It is also very difficult for a kid to pick and choose what level of balance s/he would prefer in a school – ie breadth of course work in a subject vs breadth of courses across subjects. Especially when the student is not in a position to judge whether a certain level of breadth is adequate, as they have no exposure to the field at all going in.

26

Harvard does not have small class sizes in CS. The introductory course CS 50 had an enrollment of 735 students in fall 2019. Also, many Princeton CS courses enroll hundreds of students.

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27

I am not sure about the hundreds. Only 200 kids declare.

28

I wasn’t advocating that people go to Alaska. It was just about the positives of going to a small school.

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29

At colleges where there’re a large number of students in STEM (or even in social sciences), CS courses, especially intro CS courses, are often taken by students who aren’t CS majors. For example, at Princeton,

and

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/news/teaching-faculty-key-opening-door

It depends on what you meant by breadth. Caltech probably demands greater breadth than almost any other school. It obviously has a broad sciences/math core and extensive SS/humanities requirements. Even within the CS major, it has more extensive (and broader) requirements than almost all other schools:

https://catalog.caltech.edu/documents/128/catalog_22_23.pdf#page=293

What Caltech lacks are certain specialties within CS (e.g. HCI, NLP) that it has chosen not to focus on (which is the way how the school handles all academic/research subjects so it doesn’t dilute its core strengths).

30

Thanks for the careful explanation. Although I tend to not count the first course. This is like Econ 101.

31

You’re right that class size drops significantly after the intro course. The next CS course (COS 226) probably has about 150 students last year (with 10 precepts/sections, assuming about 15 students per precept/section):
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall21/cos226/

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32

With those interests, I’d take a look at these schools:

  • Carleton
  • Colgate
  • Grinnell
  • Macalester
  • Middlebury
  • Morehouse, HBCU men’s college
  • St. Olaf
  • Swarthmore
  • Trinity (TX)
  • Vassar
  • Williams

St. Olaf and Carleton have an arrangement where students can take classes at the other university. Swarthmore students can take classes at Haverford and Bryn Mawr, and maybe U. Penn (I don’t know if that one’s still part of the arrangement or not). Morehouse is part of the Atlanta consortium, so additional classes can also be taken at Georgia Tech or Emory (among others). I think that being in a consortium can really expand the options for the breadth of coursework available while still having all the benefits of a small liberal arts college.

33

Thank you. I will explore those choices.

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34

Among LACs, Hamilton was early to computer science, with its professors important in the formation of a model CS curriculum for other liberal arts colleges. A book coauthored by two Hamilton professors during this era, The Analytical Engine, was used nationally. Currently, Hamilton’s data science major offers an option for students who would like to apply CS and mathematics to a field of their choice. With respect to the study of Chinese, Hamilton’s program is among the best in the nation.

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35

Note that many CS students with a prior programming background skip CS 50. So most of these students are in other majors and just want some exposure to programming.

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