which of the Liberal Art Colleges have more renowned/better CS programs, in terms of reputation in their degree, salary and education etc.?
@ucbalumnus thank you but if I’m not wrong (pardon me if I am) doesn’t that just provide what courses are available at each school? I was hoping for more of a ranking and how good the programs are in LACs
Professors from these LACs appear to have been among the first to design a model CS curriculum for liberal arts colleges. These colleges may therefore offer some of the more established programs of their type (listed in approximate order of key, upper-level courses offered at least biennially):
Hamilton
Swarthmore
Williams
Grinnell
Allegheny
Vassar
Washington & Lee
Colgate
Denison
Amherst
Bowdoin
(Sources: The Liberal Arts Computer Science consortium and table provided by ucbalumnus.)
Re #2
The course offerings are important in that a school that has limited CS offerings may not be a very satisfying place to study CS.
Cornell is not a liberal arts college but you can makor in CS in the College of Arts and Sciences…the liberal arts part of the university.
Any list which omits Carleton would be incomplete. Superb CS program.
What are the OP’s grades and test scores? That might make a difference.
Is money an issue? Does OP need financial or merit aid?
Denison and Puget Sound have good programs to my knowledge.
I don’t know that LAC CS programs are ranked anywhere, but we got a pretty good sense of how robust the programs were at different schools by looking at a few data points. First, you can easily learn how many faculty a given school has by visiting the departmental website. Five or more CS profs is a pretty robust program for a LAC (though even 4 isn’t bad). Also, you can see how many CS majors graduated in the previous year by looking at http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ (enter school name and go to Programs and Majors). Anything in the mid-teens or higher is a pretty big LAC program. Finally, the excellent table compiled by @ucbalumnus is quite helpful in getting a sense of the breadth of a school’s offerings. A deeper dive into schools’ course catalogs is also worthwhile. Are you interested in security? Natural language processing? Artificial intelligence? See if they occasionally or regularly offer upper level electives in those topics. How many sections of intro CS do they offer? Is there a separate track for majors and non-majors?
Once you’re actually at the point of visiting, I strongly encourage seeking out profs and upperclassmen majors and pumping them for info. How do grads do on the job market? How supportive is the school in helping students find internships? Are there fun clubs, hackathons, etc to be a part of? What’s their general approach to the curriculum?
Regarding specific schools, there are lots of good suggestions above. Carleton, Swarthmore and Williams are probably top of the heap, but also very tough admits. I don’t know the OP’s gender, but many of the premier women’s colleges (Williams, Smith, Mt. Holyoke) also have very good programs. A little more under the radar, @coldinminny can attest that the program at Trinity University in TX is excellent.
@osuprof’s suggestions are also very good. My son is headed to Puget Sound next year, though strength of CS program was only one of several criteria that led to that decision. If he’d been deciding purely on the basis of CS, he probably would have gone to Trinity U, which was one of his final contenders.
^Oops – listed Williams above with the women’s colleges when I meant Wellesley.
I’d add Lafayette College and Union College to the list. Both of these LACs also offer engineering and are strong in the STEM fields in general.
Harvey Mudd College has excellent CS program.
I agree with @Ballerina016 -
Harvey Mudd probably has the most renowned and intensive CS program of all LACs.
HMC can barely be classified as a LAC, considering its lack (LACk?) of humanities majors and STEM-based core curriculum.
Science and math are liberal arts. The degree requirements there also include substantial humanities and social studies as well as science and math.
@ucbalumnus Fair enough, but it’s also 29% engineering majors, significantly higher than other LACs with engineering, and many engineering colleges (eg Tufts, Cornell) have heavy humanities requirements.
Agree about HMC. I sometimes forget about it when talking about LACs because I have it in a slightly different mental category.
Either way the important thing is for the OP to hear about HMC and then he/she can decide if it is a good fit or not.
I’ve taken CS courses at an obscure little “regional university” in my area, one that most of you have never heard of. They were fine. I bet there are decent CS programs within easy driving distance of communities all over the country. The most respected CS programs are at research universities (Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, MIT) but you can cover more than the basics at many small colleges. Check the CS course listings and faculty bios, but don’t overlook the overall quality and fit of the whole college.