Fort Collins is the home of a large design center for AMD, a design center for Intel, design and manufacturing plant for Broadcom, design and manufacturing for Hewlett Packard, as well as a major aerospace employer Woodward Governor. I live in Boulder by the way. I would say the best high tech city in Colorado is Colorado Springs.
Look at Indeed to figure out where the jobs are in Colorado. California has many more jobs. Most C students at U of Colorado do not get offers. If you have a good GPA you may be OK. Most employers in Boulder recruit in California for a reason. Oracle for instance.
Boulder does not have very many successful startups. The reason I know is that I work in Technology Transfer. There is way less venture capital money and many start ups are very green PhD students in chemical engineering and they fail. California ventures fail too, thats the nature of high tech, but there are way way more jobs in California in any category.
Here is a way to evaluate Berkeley versus UCLA versus U of Colorado, look at how many patents are filed
and what sort of companies are being formed at each university:
U of Colorado Anschutz Medical School has way more patents than the Boulder campus.
Boulder is offering a good education in some fields, in particular in meteorology and climate modeling, chemistry, physics, and chemical engineering and aerospace engineering. LASP, NIST, NOAA, NCAR, JILA are very good scientific institutions. a few Boulder undergraduates will work at these labs.
COLORADO SPRINGS? LOL! And yeah, C students don’t get jobs. period. I have a buddy in the CS program doing temporary work with the Twitter office in Boulder. He turned down an offer from them because he can make more money in the tech center. http://tech.co/microsoft-uber-twitter-google-boulder-2017-04
Colorado Springs has the most high tech jobs in Colorado. The Air Force Academy location means
that lots of former Air Force engineers are wanting to live there and do.
Colorado Springs is now almost as big as Denver.
Denver offers a lot of jobs too. Boulder is a research focused city with very few jobs. Longmont and Fort Collins
have more bachelor level engineering jobs than Boulder. If you earn a PhD, Boulder will be better.
correction,Boulder has plenty of jobs. Many firms like Google will be recruiting at MIT over CU Boulder. Boulder’s jobs require more education, there are jobs but they are in meteorology, materials science, computer science and often require a PhD. Boulder is a very educated city but the jobs are located in Broomfield, Longmont, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, if you want to get a job with a bachelors degree.
totally not saying there aren’t more jobs in Cali, pure population statistics bear that out. I’m just saying CU can and does provide students with great employment opportunities.
It does but I am disappointed in the mentoring and job placement that CU Engineering offers vs the CU Business school, its like night and day as I have D’s in both schools. D in engineering graduated, and was basically cut loose to go find work on her own, other D at CU Business has multiple mentors/interviews/internships. CU engineering needs to up its game. JMHO.
@CU123, do you have an opinion on UCCS for engineering, specifically computer science? Decent, OK as a launch pad for transfer to Boulder, or neither? Goal is an advanced degree, not direct to industry. Here in CA, students like my son with 3.6 GPAs, even if they are late-blooming geniuses, are not welcome in the flagship universities.
@PadreDeTres sorry for the delayed response, I was out at the UChicago admitted student dat with my youngest daughter. Yes I would recommend UCCS as a start point (relatively cheap for OOS) and if they do well (3.5+) they can transfer fairly easily to CU Boulder which makes prospects for grad school better, if not than they could continue on with a masters at UCCS if they have a 2.75+.
@CU123@PadreDeTres the credits at UCCS do not transfer to CU Engineering quite often. They are two different engineering programs with very different bars. So, PadreDeTres’s son may need four years in Boulder after one year at UCCS. While CU Engineering does a really poor job helping students find jobs,it does have a high bar for admissions and for credit transfers. UCCS has a very low bar for admissions and credit transfers. So its an iffy idea to start at UCCS, unless the student wants to start over at CU Boulder. The very basic credits should transfer but most of the advanced CS classes are not very good at UCCS. CU Boulder does not accept HL physics for credit either, but will accept AP Physics C only. CU Boulder is a bear about transferring credits too. The reason CU Engineering does not help students find jobs is that engineering recruiting is done by school. So for instance Oracle will recruit at certain schools and CU Boulder Engineering is NOT one of those schools. Intel up in Fort Collins recruits at schools like Stanford, MIT etc, but not CU Boulder Engineering. However, the education at CU Boulder engineering is fine. So students can readily find jobs in California such as your daughter. Colorado firms are very very picky about recruiting. Broadcom in Fort Collins will also only recruit out of UIUC, Purdue, MIT and other top ranked schools. Its too bad but thats how engineering works today.
CU Boulder does provide a list of equivalent courses at UCCS so quite a few from your first year would transfer, if not all. My D took a couple of summer courses at UCCS to get ahead at CU Boulder so I have some practical experience here (since I paid for them) including Calculus and Physics courses. Transferring would take place after year one, not your junior year.
Every large corporation recruits MIT and Stanford. I have friends kids that get recruited out of Mines, CU needs to up its game with businesses that hire engineers or see its best high school talent leave Colorado for schools that have better relations with top employers.
@CU123 Mines is pretty bad too at job placement. Most kids are getting placed in Texas ,and a few in Montana in oil and gas companies and some in Denver, in the oil and gas industry. I see lots of Mines kids struggling for a year or more to get jobs. The kids with good grades are doing better though. The connections at Mines to firms like Broadcom in Fort collins or Google in Boulder are nonexistent. Its totally ridiculous that our graduates have to move to California to find work but thats what is happening.
@CU123@PadreDeTres One thing that is really important, there is no two year plan from community college to CU Boulder. One year is better. UCCS is not a community college, its a smaller four year college but there is no two year plan that works to transfer into CU Engineering. California is much more organized about how this works. Colorado just is not very organized, but if your son is very careful he should be able to transfer credits, but be very careful. There is no way two years at UCCS is a good idea in CS. The program is not very strong there. At CU Boulder he will get classes that will be similar to UCLA in his major. At UCCS, he will get a degree called computer security and I just don’t recommend it. There is a CS degree, again, very few advanced classes and the classes are way easier at UCCS.
@Coloradomama your mixing things up here. UCCS offers a Bachelor of innovation (BI) in computer security, but it also offers a BS in CS. Don’t ask me what a BI is though, no clue.
@CU123. If you read my post again, I said that. There are two degrees offered, one in computer science and one in “computer security”. As far as what BI means, it means nothing at all. No self respecting company will care about something called a “bachelors in innovation”. Neither one is worth very much in the Colorado or California job market.
UCCS is a small school. It may be OK for a student who wants to stay local but for a student
@CU123 sorry, I hit return before I finished. For any student who wants to be competitive in the CS job market
the only degree that will work is a degree from CU Engineering, maybe CSU Engineering and Mines. UCCS is not any where near difficult enough and skills for graduates are going to be too weak to compete.
The job market in CS is ultra competitive. Students need every edge. If a student plays around at UCCS all they are doing is wasting time in my opinion. No top job will ever come their way. @PadreDeTres said his son wants a PhD. there is no way UCCS is the right school for a student aiming at a PhD.