CS undergrad questions

Applying to College
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Hello everyone

Hi have a high school senior in CIT specialty school getting ready to apply. We live in VA, obviously interested in VA Tech & UVa. We would like to help him try a bit off his comfort zone as well and apply for other Universities that are in Top 10 for Under Grad for Computer Science. If i have to put a spreadsheet together before i make some decisions, what should i have to compare against others. Obviously money is an aspect, in-state vs out. There is also talk about teacher/student ratio, funds for undergrad, scholarship, research projects they fund, campus job offers etc. Appreciate any help for me to get started. Thank you all.

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If you focus on rankings, you’re going to miss some very important possibilities. Rankings almost always leave programs out that don’t offer PhDs.

What I did was pull up UVa and VT on College Scorecard to find the median 2 year out salary for CS grads. It’s $88k at VT and $93K at UVa. I made that the floor, because why pay more for a school where the earnings potential is less. That left 28 programs.

Of those, I pulled the programs that I know will have small class sizes and great student support. It is not comprehensive. I don’t know all of the schools. I intentionally left of programs that are very good, but have giant classes like Illinois and Cal Berkeley. I also left off extreme long shot admissions like Stanford, MIT and Harvard.

For a reference the median earnings at 2 years for Stanford, MIT and Berkeley grads are $136K, $128K, and $125K respectively.

That left, in no particular order:

Pomona - $128K
Harvey-Mudd - $142K
Rose - Hulman - $112K
Cal Poly - $120K

I’d add Carnegie Mellon, but with a caveat, classes will be bigger and there will be a higher reliance on TAs, but not like Cal and Illinois. $160K

Hopefully that’s a start.

If you haven’t completed a FAFSA yet, you need to do that to know your EFC. Expensive schools can be less expensive with need-based aid. Of the ones on the list, Rose is the only one likely to offer any merit aid.

He needs to decide on intangibles too. They are every bit as important. Are sports important? Weather? Location? Support for hobbies like skiing, hiking or surfing?

Good luck!

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This is a good enough reason UIUC off any list. :grinning:

Maybe only 1/3 of your time is spent in your major. It does help if you like where you are spending 4 years of your life.

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Thanks for the info. His SAT score is 1520, his GPA is pretty good as well so far. His considerations for out of state are, UIUC,Austin,Georgia Tech,UPenn, UMD etc. EFC, not sure since my wife and i work. How to differentiate in terms of the funds they have for research projects in Undergrad etc. What else should be in consideration.

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If applying for CS, add George Mason as a safety . Check entry to CS for VaTech and UVA.
If you’re in an overrepresented demograhic,
CS is even more competitive. All the colleges you have listed OOS are reaches for CS. Many more kids with great stats like your child and not enough spots.

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If i have to put a spreadsheet together that i should, what should it have.

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Barring Penn with a 2 year median of $130K, but also a long shot admission for most, I wouldn’t apply to any of those schools. None offer any advantage over his in state options. The earnings at 2 years out are the same or lower than the Virginia schools with the exception of UIUC only slightly higher at $101K. All will be MUCH more expensive.

I have a significant bias towards schools with small classes, taught by professors, with lots of student opportunities to apply what they’ve learned academically. Our approach was why pay more for a school that offered no more than our state flagship.

Our son did end up at an OOS public (BS/MS ME Cal Poly), but it is fairly unique in the public engineering realm. It’s a largish school (20K), so it has great facilities (not as important for CS), but it has all small classes, nearly all taught by instructors with terminal degrees, including labs and discussions. The only other OOS schools he applied to were financial safeties in the Western Undergraduate Exchange.

That really depends on what’s important to your son. For me median salary 2 years out from College Scorecard and EFC would rule all other considerations. Beyond that, the other things don’t matter if either he’ll (on average) make less, or you can’t afford it. Then you need to start reading about the schools that meet the financial and salary requirements to see if you can determine what the experience will be like. Pay attention to things like M:F ratio, location, support for hobbies, etc.

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I don’t know what’s important for you. But keep in mind that acceptance rates to CS is different from general acceptance rates. UMD is one such case. You will need to check each university’s website to see what they say about their CS program admissions. So that would clearly be an entry in the spreadsheet, along with COA.

Also, many of the universities you listed will have supplemental essays. They are important and the student needs to spend time researching the universities to answer these supplemental questions.

Eta: agree with the other post that your OOS list is not going to add much when you have very good options in state, unless you want to apply widely to aim for CS major. In that case, you may need to go down in selectivity not laterally.

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You really need to understand different admission selectively at the OOS public schools. UIUC and UT-Austin are extremely difficult for CS. As an example, an extremely accomplished friend of my DS (4.0/36) got rejected at UIUC. He is currently at CMU for CS.

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Yea, I didn’t mix selectivity into the mix of any of the ones I recommended, but all but probably Rose are going to be reaches. I don’t know the others, but I know Cal Poly is expecting just under 6000 applications for 200 slots. The way I was looking at it though was that it was going to be hard to beat his instate options without applying to selective programs.

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What do you mean when you say selective programs - can you please give some examples

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Can you please help how i should research the Universities to answer. We are working on the supplemental essays.

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is there an option to find out the number of applications received for the year 2020-21 for each University and the open slots. Do the universities also provide information about their selection percentage for OOS candidates. I heard UT Austin reserver 90% to instate candidates. Is that a fair assumption

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In general, selective schools are schools that accept less than 50% of their applicants. CS can be VERY selective though. The example I gave above, Cal Poly received over 5000 applications last year for 170 slots. It is ultra selective.

Very few schools are as transparent as Cal Poly when it comes to the actual number of applicants and acceptances by individual major. You can get general information from Common Data Sets (CDS), but as you’ve been warned, the statistics for the whole school will grossly overestimate your student’s chances for CS.

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You have excellent instate options so I would start there. Engineering is a very tough admit though so even very top students are not being admitted these days. For a BS in Computer Science , you would be in the engineering school at both UVA and VT. And your son may change his mind about CS so overall fit is important .

Schools like Alabama, Pitt, etc. give merit so decide if you want to pursue that option as opposed to your instate schools. Meets need top schools can work too depending on your EFC and getting admitted of course. Set a budget and communicate that early on to your son.

I wouldn’t focus too much on salary as was reported earlier in the thread. Some of that is location dependent and who is bothering to report their salary and a top CS student should do well coming from many schools. But, since the salary issue has been brought up, here’s another resource from 2021 from pay scale about CS salaries . Sorry, I’m bad with links but these schools do well with salary in their college salary report.

  1. Harvey Mudd
  2. Stanford
    3.Berkeley
  3. Harvard
  4. CMU
    6…MIT
  5. Princeton
  6. Columbia
  7. Dartmouth
    10.Yale
  8. Duke
  9. Brown
    13.Penn
  10. U Washington
  11. Rice

16.UC Santa Barbara
17. CUNY Hunter
18. UC Santa Cruz
19. Brandeis
20. University of Virginia
24. Cal Poly SLO

  1. University of Southern California

  2. Virginia Tech

  3. University of Michigan

55.George Mason
64. William & Mary
65. University of Texas Austin

Many more reports out there and they will all tell you something different so I recommend not overthinking it. Cost, fit, location. 49. Georgia Tech . I’m sure these kinds of reports are not dissuading Georgia residents from applying!

Good luck!

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It is very much location dependant, like all salaries are. Unlike PayScale which is 100% self reported, the data I provided is not. It is biased though because it only includes students who received some sort of federal assistance, either through a federally backed loan or a federal grant. Since roughly 70% of students graduate with some debt, this is probably a reasonably representative cross section.

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There are so many reports and rankings out there that it can just become noise at some point. There are tons of schools out there that will provide a good education for CS and will provide great outcomes. A lot will be up to the individual in terms of what they end up accomplishing.

I’ve tried to edit my last post but it doesn’t take. Virginia Tech is #47, not #46, so I would take VT off the list! :slight_smile:

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Based on the snark, it appears that didn’t actually read the original post, nor my replies. The OP asked about top 10 schools. I replied that they had such good state options in VA that if he wanted to apply somewhere else he should look beyond the rankings. Why? Because some of the “Top 10” programs earnings aren’t as good as those of their very good state flagships. Nowhere did I say chase rankings. Nowhere did I malign UVa or VT.

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I had asked this earlier… I want to additionally ask, is this even important to consider when we are applying ? We are very much new to this process so all your inputs are extremely helpful to give us a wide perspective. Thank you.

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And I never said you did malign any school or say to chase rankings. Sorry if you took it that way. And if anything, making fun of myself for pointing out a 47 instead of a 46! This kind of stuff can get crazy and confusing for parents and kids looking for a good fit. I was just suggesting that the OP might not want to rely too heavily on any report or ranking as many will have some bias.

OP-To find out number of applications, etc. you can look at a school’s Common Data Set.

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