How is computer science at NYU Poly?

Colleges and Universities A-Z New York University
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Hi all - I’m a bit conflicted in my college-selection process. I’m planning to major in computer science, and I’ve narrowed my options down to three schools: NYU Poly, Purdue, and Maryland. With that being said, I’m very much trying to find reasons to love and enroll at NYU Poly, but it’s difficult for me because there’s not much data to back it up. If anyone could answer any of my questions below, I’d very much appreciate it!

  1. Why is NYU Poly's ranking for computer science incredibly low? According to US News, it ranks 70th, which honestly doesn't sound too right to me, considering how tough I've heard the curriculum is. I'd really love for this especially to be clarified.
  2. What is NYU Poly's average salary for CS majors in particular? I've seen stats for the average graduating salary for the school as a whole (around 55K) but nothing specific to CS majors. I've seen that Purdue's average is around 75K (some up to 100K), so I'm wondering if that'd be hard to obtain at NYU Poly for CS or not, given that I'm an average graduate there.
  3. What's the job placement rate for NYU Poly CS graduates? I don't need a specific percentage, but it'd be great and reassuring to hear if it's pretty high and to know that virtually all CS majors are given some sort of job they're satisfied with out of college.
  4. Will NYU Poly for CS be recognized else where outside of NYC? I've read in the past that the prestige that the school holds is rather restricted to NYC, but I feel like that's not exactly true. Will it remain the same in, say, Silicon Valley if I choose to move there at some point?
  5. Are students generally satisfied with this school for CS? Would you say it's worth coming here to study it over colleges like Purdue or Maryland that have an established reputation for a strong CS curriculum?

Answers to any of these questions would be extremely appreciated. Long story short, I really want to go to NYU, but I can only go there if I find that it has at least better potential than my other top schools. Honestly, I’d primarily love to hear that it has a high placement rate upon graduation and that CS graduates typically have a high starting salary. Cost isn’t really a problem for my family, but I do realize NYU is significantly more expensive than the rest of my schools. If anyone has any other reasons to consider one of my schools over NYU Poly, I’d love to hear it too. Thanks!

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This post is on the second page: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/new-york-university/1759181-why-is-nyu-poly-not-well-known-even-though-it-prepares-it-graduates-well.html#latest

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With apologies to CC, I’m going to copy most of my reply from http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tufts-university/1761659-tufts-v-nyu-for-engineering-cs.html#latest to here. But first:

  1. Are students generally satisfied with this school for CS?

What I can tell you is that none of the four CS majors from my son’s freshman suite expect to finish their education at Poly, and that includes one kid who was on nearly full scholarship. The last two (including my son) at this point are not planning on registering for their Junior year.

Before they started breaking out statistics, NYU Poly had a 60% graduation rate in six years, which should (have been for us) a read flag. Right now my son is very frustated and says the school hates its students.

The NYU Poly intro CS courses are bad. (I feel qualified to say this, after reviewing the course material, since I have 40 years industry experience and an MIT CS degree myself.) I can get very specific about this if you’d like. The first course – CS1114 is supposed to be Introduction to Computer Science, but its really about memorizing obscure artifacts of Python (from this course one would think the most important principle of computer science is what the * operator does when used on strings), never relating them to general CS principles. The problem sets are entirely uninteresting – mostly meaningless text manipulation. By the end of semester they’re doing exciting things like keeping bank balances.

The second course on Object Oriented programming (CS1124) has similar problems, focusing on the edge cases of C++, rather than serious principles of Object Oriented design. But that course is even harder (I was aghast when in the freshman orientation the admissions lady actually admitted that 30% of the students flunk this course, yet they’ve done nothing to change it.) My son lost 15% on his first exam for not putting “const” declarations on methods with no side-effects (i.e. his code was completely correct, but with the const declaration the compiler might be able to optimize it slightly better). he lost more points because he wrote a for loop with {} around the single statement that was in the body of the for loop (again, his code was completely correct – this time they took points off for a stylistic issue). Mind you, this is all while writing code with a pencil in a test booklet.

Don’t even get me started on the required two-semester writing program. They’ve turned it over the NYU, so the engineering students are now being forced to write literature criticism graded by frustrated Adjunct faculty (read: English majors, who couldn’t get real faculty appointments anywhere, being paid a pittance to teach these courses).

As far as earning stastitics go – my son’s roommates stayed in NYC and they’re working as programmers. Didn’t need Poly’s placement dept and didnt need a degree. Consider the high salary statistics may have something to do with a lot of these kids working in NY where the cost of living and salaries are high – whether they graduate or not!