Everyone says for computer science it doesn’t matter where you go for college(as long as it’s tier 1) but if you had a chance to get into MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford or Berkeley for CS does that change things? Of course it being predicated on money being in range for the colleges.
It’ll be easier to get internships at the top firms as they recruit there. It’ll help get into top grad schools if you want to get into research.
If all you want to do is get a job after graduation then it doesn’t make a huge difference as long as you perform. My spouse teaches CS at a not top-ranked university and she’s had plenty of her old students/TAs that got co-ops at firms like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc and jobs there after graduation.
It depends. If you have to go into massive amounts of debt to pay for private/OOS colleges, then it’s not worth it. Any “prestige bump” in salary would be more than offset by your debt payments. Also, it doesn’t even have to be a tier 1 school. I graduated from a tier 2 school and I had no trouble finding a job. I never did an internship either. A masters degree at any school will squash a tier 1 bachelors degree any day of the week. Most of your education will be on the job. Just choose an affordable practical school and get good at programming.
Those schools might help you to get better internships and possibly better jobs right out of college, but as Dolemite mentioned if you’re just looking for a job in CS then they might not be worth paying a huge premium over less “prestigious” schools since IT jobs will be determined on your skills not where you got your degree.
Where those schools will provide a huge advantage is if you ever want to found a startup or be a major player in a startup and need to get VC financing. Certain degrees will open doors for financing ventures.
I’m asking along the lines of the schools being about equal in cost or say within $5,000 -$10,000 a year difference.
@Dolemite what GPA do you think shows that? Curious bc CS is not an easy major, so I am not clear on what is a good gpa for it?
To shed a little more light on the situation my S has high likelihood of getting into 2 of those top 4 schools but they aren’t necessarily his first choice at this point. If the money range was as I described above would he be passing up an incredible opportunity by not choosing one of these top CS schools?
I think there are so many factors.
1> If he doesn’t like those schools, I wouldn’t encourage him to go there. Or at least have the honest discussion with him to find out why? Listen to his reasoning without having your mind made up. Maybe he doesn’t want the pressure? Maybe he likes the feel at another school? Maybe he doesn’t like where CMU is and would rather go to a more rural school?
2> No matter where he goes, he most likely won’t be the smartest/best anymore. If he’s worried about that and that is why he doesn’t want to go to the top, you might gently let him know that very smart and bright kids go to the next tier as well for different reasons and if you want to be the “big fish” in the small pond, it might not work out that way.
I don’t believe that CS undergrad is as important as grad school. My son picked a university on that and wishes he would have made a different choice. Not because the quality of education is different, but because the atmosphere at that campus isn’t what he hoped for.
Getting a grad CS degree on top of a decent undergrad CS degree is almost always overkill.
The only cases I can think of where it makes sense is:
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The person is interested in academia.
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The person is interested in research/theory (private sector, academia).
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The person is an international student without a employment sponsorship who wants stay in the States longer and hopefully get sponsored for work.
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The person went to a undergrad CS program that just did not open enough opportunities, and then somehow got into a top CS program for grad school (this can be avoided by just going to a good CS program for undergrad).
I went to one of these 4 schools for engineering. And 30+ years later, i will get hits on my resume and linkedin because of attending one of those schools. So there can be a longer term affect. My personal decision would be to not have the difference go over 100K, as over a lifetime I believe that is the value IF AND BIG IF, you have the $. . This is also assuming not going to graduate school. This is only my opinion.
Top tech talent – particularly in programming – always rises to the top.
Top tech talent tends to be auto-didactic anyway and never stops learning new things, even after college.
I have posted this before, but my tech firm has great programmers from top CS schools like CMU – but we only have 3 essential geniuses, who coincidentally attended 3 different SUNY schools.
He doesn’t plan on going to grad school at this point.
All things equal yes, but I would consider fit and cost factors when considering schools even close to the same caliber (Top 50 CS schools or so). Once you hit 100 or so, maybe the effect is stronger, but again, it’s not that big of a difference. As mentioned, grad school vs industry is another consideration generally.
@HRSMom That’s a good question. I could see GPA thresholds being different depending on the school. Some CS degrees are obtained via A&S and others via Engineering and then of course schools are putting CS in their own College (Informatics). It might be a lot like Engineering and anything over 3.0 won’t hold you back or maybe you’ll need a 3.5 at the top firms. I’ll ask around.
I’m going to guess that the kids at my spouse’s school that are getting these Co-ops have 3.5+, work as graders in lower level classes and are getting good recommendations from Professors.
At least in my experience, GPA is a very secondary part of co-ops and jobs. I know people who got co-op’s at top companies with close to 3.0 GPA’s on both sides of the cutoff. Experience is far more important and GPA will really only matter for that first internship/co-op. Only two companies I know of use a 3.5 cutoff at my school, but many use 3.0 as the bar. And it is just that - a bar to cross rather than a spectrum. I don’t think any major company is saying "well this person has a 3.7 and this one a 3.6) but is rather looking at experience and interviews far more to make hiring decisions.
Interesting insight. Thanks!
Depends on what the other college choices are. Some other colleges have good CS departments that will provide a good range of high quality CS offerings, while other colleges have much more limited CS departments where the number of upper level CS courses is barely sufficient for a CS major, and each may be offered infrequently.
Regarding college GPA being considered by employers, NACE surveys suggest that 3.0 is the most common cut-off GPA that employers use as one of the criteria to determine which college applicants are considered for interviews.
However, at some colleges, there may be a threshold GPA or competitive admission process to get into the CS major if one does not initially enter with direct admission to the major. Because CS has become so popular these days, that is something to consider if the student is admitted to the college without direct admission to the major.
Is this the student who has a 4.0 GPA, interest in CS, and recruitable talent in football (some DI-FBS, more DI-FCS, many DIII)?
If he is considering playing football in college, note that CS courses with programming projects are high workload. So a large CS department which offers most courses each semester may allow him to push more of the higher workload courses into the spring (non-football season), at least in the later years.
Colleges on the quarter system (e.g. Stanford, UCLA) may also be favorable, because then only 1/3 of the school year will overlap with football season, versus 1/2 of the school year on the semester system.
@ucbalumnus Yes that’s the same student. His preference(for football) would be to play at a higher level but he struggles with the idea of saying no to MIT or Carnegie Mellon for CS. Many say D1-FBS would be too difficult to do football and CS at that level. Could it be done? sure but at what cost. Now Stanford and Duke are still a possibility but we won’t know for sure until after the summer. Many people say the perfect compromise for the football and high academics that would have balance is the Ivy/Patriot league.
My spouse confirmed basically what @PengsPhils said. You have to have >3.0 to be a Grader(Not allowed to call them TAs - only PhD candidates can be called a TA) and most of the top students work as Graders for whatever Prof nominated them. That’s how you get the best recommendations. The interview is big for those jobs.