To be clear, you have decided to consider colleges with less than 2000 students?
Well, I would suggest Case Western again a little bit of a smart, but quirky reputation, like U of Chicago, with (only slightly) less intensity.
OP, that’s a nice list. I would echo other posters who suggested Rice (large enough for you) and Macalester (smaller than you want, but has that nice quirky reputation).
When I saw your original post and read that you wanted CS, no more than 7k students, and that you are interested in politics, I thought “Tufts”. Saw you are planning on ED1, so yes, good choice (full disclosure: my older D with a lot of International Relations interests is finishing up at Tufts with a CS major).
Do take a bit more of a look at the Claremonts. The consortium is very tightly knit together–all five campuses are located right next to each other, and course enrollment is seamless across campuses. Younger D is at Pitzer and she easily signs up for courses for the other schools at the same time as for her Pitzer courses. The consortium gives you a community of 5k students. Agree that you would be unlikely to get into Mudd with that math SAT score, but do look at Pomona, Scripps (yes, a woman’s school but in the consortium a different feel than most women’s colleges) and Pitzer (quirkiest of the bunch, not to everyone’s taste).
Union near Albany and Marist in Poughkeepsie have good reputations for CS.
I very strongly disagree with this, though it depends on the school. Some LACs have very good CS, while others don’t.
ABET accreditation isn’t a big issue in CS, but if a program is accredited, it does give some indication that the program at least meets minimum standards.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) publishes curriculum guidelines for undergraduate CS programs
(https://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations).
These describe the course sequences a strong CS program should cover.
The Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium (LACS) has published CS curriculum guidelines specifically for small liberal arts colleges. (http://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmetaxas/LACS2007report.pdf).
For any college that interests you, you can investigate how well its CS requirements and course offerings measure up against these recommendations. For a summary of guidelines, see sections 10 and 11 of the LACS 2007 report. It specifies 12 required courses for a CS major: 3 introductory courses, 5 core courses, 3 elective courses, and a supporting math course, covering specific topics. Section 10 concludes,
Here are the number of CS faculty at a few LACs:
5 Haverford
7 Bryn Mawr (not including “affiliated faculty”)
6 Oberlin
6 Wesleyan
10 Vassar (not including staff)
I would not say that Computer Science is a particular strength of small liberal arts colleges. These schools are competing for faculty against companies and universities that can offer better pay and a richer variety of ongoing projects. You certainly won’t find the number of courses and faculty at, say, Haverford that you would at a top research university. On the other hand, Haverford won’t find you in CS lectures with hundreds of students (as you’d get in CS 61A at Berkeley, enrolling 900+ students, which is followed in sequence by CS 61B, Data Structures, with about 500 students).
@Coffeelover123 it is interesting that you have U Mass as a safety when it is one of the best programs in the country for computer science. It is very possible you won’t get accepted for that major because it draws students from all over. I will guess the acceptance rate is between 5% - 10%.
You have to decide whether Computer Science is a career path or you just think it is a cool major. If its the former, you are barking up the wrong tree, and this is coming from a parent with two boys in small New England schools.
The kids pursuing this career path are very intense and the companies hiring look for talent at schools you dont seem to like.
Are you a gamer?
How about Stevens Institute of Technology? It’s not a liberal arts college, of course, but they do have some artsy majors to balance out the student body. It’s just under 3000 students, if what you’re really wanting is the intimate experience more than the liberal arts curriculum.
CS is a very marketable major.
I doubt that a strong student graduating with a CS degree from a selective LAC will have too much trouble finding a decent job. Will you necessarily be competitive against candidates from CMU or MIT for positions at Google or Apple? No … but those are hardly the only companies offering good jobs for CS majors.
http://code.org/stats
After your first few years on a job, it is unlikely (not impossible, but unlikely) that you will rise very far up the career ladder just by virtue of your technical computing skills. Good programmers are valuable employees, but even more valuable (and rare) are computer scientists with good communication skills, who can understand the context of complex business problems and effectively lead production teams. A good LAC can help you develop those skills (possibly even better than some large research universities).
The following pages show the activities of recent graduates of several CS programs at LACs:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/computer-science/alumni/index.shtml
https://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/cs/alumniprofiles/
http://www.macalester.edu/academics/mscs/about/alumni/
http://www.wesleyan.edu/mathcs/cs/jobs_etc.html
http://www.cs.williams.edu/people/alumni-directory/
The following page may be especially helpful:
http://cs.smith.edu/paths.php
Be sure to click on the “read more” links. These profiles show the academic “paths” followed by CS majors at one LAC. Some of these recent graduates wound up at IBM, Raytheon/BBN, the NY Times, Google, Facebook, Apple, Putnam Investments, and Oracle … as well in graduate programs.
These profiles appear to show a very good success rate, especially when you consider that in 2010, Smith College apparently only graduated 10 CS majors.
The computer science textbook, “The Analytical Engine,” was co-written by two Hamilton professors. While you will find university professors who have also written textbooks, the advantage of a smaller college is that you would have the opportunity to learn directly and interactively from any professor on the faculty.
UMass Amherst’s acceptance rates for CS:
http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-acceptance-rate-for-undergraduates-studying-computer-science-in-UMass
I’m really not worried about getting admitted to umass for CS; it is my instate flagship and I have never heard of anyone from my tech classes at school not being a direct admit, especially if they are female. Their acceptance rate for computer science is actually 50 percent, higher for in state students, not ten percent. No, I am not a gamer. That being said, there is a reason why I am also applying to Clark.
@2019Parent, your negativity has been hard to deal with on this thread. No, I’m probably not going to get recruited to work at Google coming from Lafayette or Wesleyan. However, there is simply no way that every single programmer this country needs (upwards of 500K in the next decade or so) are exclusively coming from the top 20 public flagships and MIT/CMU. I have repeatedly told you that I will happier and more successful in a smaller environment. I have been open to expanding my location boundaries and am willing to look at more mid-size schools. However I don’t know how many times I have said that I will NOT be happy or successful at a giant school. I know myself well enough to say this. If you are going to repeatedly come on to this thread to tell me that Purdue or Berkeley are the only paths to success in CS, you are being unhelpful and frankly, disrespectful.
A family friend recommended I look into Emory, Vanderbilt, and Wash U. They meet the size I’m about looking for and Wash U appears to be Tufts but in MO. Would I feel out of place here, though, being liberal? I know that most top 50 or so schools lean left anyways, but Atlanta and Nashville and St Louis are definitely going to be more conservative than Boston.
If you are willing to relax your geographic requirements, check out Grinnell- it has a great CS dept and students often have summer internships at Amazon. But if Vassar was too much of a bubble, and too liberal, Grinnell will be even more so.
@2019Parent is also wrong when s/he tells you that going to a massive state school or MIT, CMU or Stanford is the only path to success. CS is CS is CS, if you go to a school that follows the guidelines outlined above for a CS department, you’ll be on equal footing, education wise, with people who went to “stronger” departments. When it comes to hiring, the most important thing is your interview, followed by internships/projects/personal programming experience, followed by the answer to the question “Do you have a degree?”
Big companies don’t come to recruit at SLACs because there just aren’t enough comp sci majors to make it worth the travel costs, but that says nothing about the quality of the comp sci majors. Frankly, it’s insulting to the OP that s/he is implying that OP isn’t really serious about CS because she doesn’t want to sacrifice a small school environment for prestige, which by extension is implying that everyone who goes to a small school isn’t really serious about CS. I have friends at Swarthmore and Williams through the CS world and they are extremely talented programmers who just happened to want a small, liberal arts environment where they could benefit from small classes and an intimate environment. I dare you to look at the kind of stuff they’re working on and accuse them of not being “intense” enough.
OP, you absolutely do not have to look outside the Northeast unless you want to. If your strong preference is to remain in the Northeast, then it makes little sense to search outside this area for schools that might only equal your closer options.
I am comfortable looking outside of the northeast provided the campus is not overwhelmingly conservative (for instance, Sewanee or Washington and Lee…aren’t exactly what I’m looking for).
Then you could find a place at WUSTL or Emory. Not sure about Vandy. You will find some schools to be more pre-professional in culture than others. Depending on which aspects of conservatism are important to you, and how you define it, this could be a factor for you.
I would say I am more socially liberal (aka I support gay marriage, I’m pro choice, environmentally conscious, etc) than fiscally liberal (I’m more moderate in that regard). I am not preppy. That’s what I thought in regards to Vanderbilt- that it was more conservative than Emory or WUSTL. Would Emory be a reach, or a match for me? Perhaps a high match? Low reach? (I know WUSTL would be a reach).
If you don’t think that a big school would be a good fit, it’s quite possible that working for Google/Apple/Facebook would also not be a good fit. There are plenty of fun, small companies where CS grads are doing interesting things. I’d agree that you should make sure the CS course offerings are sufficient and that classes you’ll need are offered ideally every semester. Beyond that, make sure you get internships and/or work with a professor as an undergrad, and you should be fine.
@merc81 there are lots of great schools in the northeast that match OP’s requirements, but many of them are difficult to get in to. Swarthmore, Williams, Brown, even Tufts are really difficult admits.
There are just not that many match-level LACs/small unis in the NE (or anywhere really) that have strong CS departments. For example, Skidmore has a VERY small department that I’m sure teaches the basics well, but is a little uninspired. It also does not really have the regular course offerings that you see at a Tufts or a Brown and we worried that there may be scheduling issues.
A student that wants the 2-7K school size and cultural feel of Tufts with decent CS just doesn’t have that many match options.
Emory, Vandy, WashU: Suggest you ask on these individual school forums about the political/social feel to these schools.
There are certainly lots of intense kids in this major, but there are also kids who aren’t as intense, who’ve never coded before college. Even at Harvey Mudd, the college president has prioritized making CS accessible to students who haven’t considered CS. Yes, Cal and MIT and Carnegie Mellon are CS powerhouses. They’re excellent choices for those who’ve been coding since they were born 
. They are certainly not the only path for a potential CS major.