CS student Cornell Eng or Berkeley L&S (instate)

College Search & Selection
1

Hello, I am a rising college freshmen. In the future, I hope to get into product management and maybe entrepreneurship but this is not concrete. As for location of where I want to work, I am ok working wherever although I would like to work for a top tier software company like Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon…
I am currently choosing between Cornell or Berkeley. Here are my list of pros and cons for each school.

Berkeley Advantages:

Cheaper (in state tuition)
Close to home (I live in silicon valley)
Better job opportunities (silicon valley proximity)

Berkeley Disadvantages:

Environement (more of a nature guy)
Crowded classes
the curve for cs is rough, I should make it though

Cornell advantages

Location (I like nature)
More diverse people (geographic diversity)
Better liberal arts education
Smaller class size
Better job opportunities (More support and closer alumni connections)
Project teams/coop (not sure if there are many project teams that focus on CS outside of robotics though, but anyway my thinking was that I could gain experience in those project teams rather than slogging through berkeley’s weed out classes)
Farther from home (exercise independence)

Cornell Disadvantages

Cold/expensive

Anyway, cornell has more advantages but berkeley’s big advantage is the cost. With decisions in 4 days, can students from either school share with me advantages of their school that I may not have captured in my list of pros and cons.

2

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/university-california-berkeley/2071932-grade-distributions-in-prerequisite-courses-for-gpa-based-goals.html can help you with grade distributions in UCB CS courses which you need to earn a 3.3 GPA in to get into the L&S CS major (percentages may differ slightly this year from when that post was made).

Although UCB classes can be very large in CS, Cornell classes in CS may not necessarily be small. Unfortunately, Cornell’s publicly accessible class schedule does not show class sizes.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP19/subject/CS
https://classes.berkeley.edu/search/class/compsci?retain-filters=1&f%5B0%5D=im_field_term_name%3A831

You can check the career surveys from each school. There will likely be some regional bias.

https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Survey/2018ComputerScience.pdf
https://www.engineering.cornell.edu/industry-partners/enrollment-statistics-and-post-graduate-data/post-graduate-survey-and-reports

How does the cost difference matter to you and your family? How much would loans/debt be affected?