Nothing is guaranteed as admission to elite colleges is a crap shoot. It sucks that on top of that we are Asians.
Kid has top SATS/SATII and GPAs. My third kid will be applying to college next year. She is currently attends an elite boarding school on full need based financial aid. Two older daughters attended same boarding school and Harvard on full need based aid. Harvard was very generous with need based aid.
When I ran Net Price Calculator based on projected income, HYP were all 11K and MIT and Stanford were $20K. Other ivies and other great computer science schools are 25K. Other ranked computer science schools are OOS and therefore may not be able to afford as it is out of our reach like Berkley, UUIC, Georgia tech etc. We are still looking for other merit based scholarships too.
This summer she is working in the computer science field and summer pay is very good. Kid is gung ho about majoring in computer science. We know Stanford and MIT are great. Among HYP due to great need based aid, we are looking for computer science ranking in these schools; she can apply only one SCEA College. Because of need based aid need, ED schools are out of running in early round.
Yes we have safeties in mind and some matches too as nothing is guranteed.
Prestige doesn’t matter much for computer science. What you can do matters a lot.
I have seen software engineers from for example MIT, IIT (in India), UMass Amherst, Michigan, and UNH work side by side and no one cares where they went to university. Some of the very best software engineers that I ever worked with graduated from MIT, Michigan, UMass Amherst (two different top engineers), and Rutgers. The worst software engineer that I ever worked with graduated from Harvard, but I have heard stories of an even worse engineer from elsewhere. I will admit that in my life I have seen very few software engineers from Harvard or any Ivy League school (other than perhaps a small number from Cornell). MIT, Stanford, and Caltech are all strong for CS, but when I have been in California on business I can’t recall anyone mentioning where they had gone to university.
At least based on my experience, the main reason to go to any of HYP for computer science is if they give you really great financial aid.
I am basing this comment on the people that I have worked with, and where they went to school. Others should be able to say if some schools have recently improved their programs.
What state are you from? Can you afford your in-state public school? UMass is very good at CS if you happen to be from Massachusetts, but I am not familiar with all of the other state public universities (there are a lot in the US). I am guessing that you might be from NY based on your user ID. I am under the impression that some of the SUNY’s are very good for CS, but I don’t know for sure and wouldn’t know which ones.
If you get a great offer from HYP, then I would not be too worried about the quality of the program. Otherwise I wouldn’t go to them for computer science.
Yes we are from NY. I ran NPC on NY state universities and they cost $20K as daughter does not attend high school in NY, thus not eligible for STEM program.
We will not rank any place. But trying to make sure we have admission, financial aid as preference order. program rank though desirable but it is a distant third.
What does your daughter want to learn? What does she want to do in computer science when she graduates? What are her interests?
FWIW: Harvard and Yale (not sure about Princeton) teach what is known as “classical computer science” meaning student’s are required to understand how to build a computer as if computers did not exist today. For some student’s that’s fine, but for other’s it’s tedious and boring, as they want to learn more “creative” aspects of CS. For example, at Harvard and Yale student’s will NOT find “fun” CS courses such Computer Vision, Animation, Motion Capture, Game Design, or Virtual Reality – which are all taught at the undergraduate level at other colleges such as Stanford, Brown, and Carnegie Mellon. If all your daughter wants to learn are the fundamentals of CS, then HYP would seem to fit the bill. However, if she wants something specific and focused, HYP may not be the place for her, no matter how much financial aid is thrown her way.
I’ve taken several computer science classes at Harvard. My thoughts are that Harvard’s CS department is much more focused on the theoretical and mathematical side of CS relative to pure ‘engineering schools’ like MIT, Caltech, etc. Harvard’s CS department believes strongly that the theory-side of things is more important than implementation - their argument is that coding languages fall in and out of practice all the time, possibly even within the time you take to graduate (your daughter has probably seen this herself) but the underlying concepts are what is important to learn. This is also Harvard’s strong suit in terms of its current Computer Science department - a lot of its current CS professors are world-leaders in theoretical CS research, complexity theory, machine learning, cryptography, and so forth (Jelani Nelson, Harry Lewis, Madhu Sudan etc.)
This will mean that beyond a some specific classes that are implementation heavy (CS50, CS51, CS124, CS182 come to mind) many of Harvard’s CS undergraduates spend a lot of time learning math, such as for understanding algorithmic complexity and so on. Relative to my friends at engineering schools, I find that I tend to have a far better understanding of this - how to actually analyze code and algorithms - but not quite as much hands-on experience - we don’t have classes specifically for things like “App Development”, “Game Dev” or how to learn X language specifically, instead we do “Machine Learning” as a whole, “Artificial Intelligence”, “Scientific Computing”, “Networks”, etc. like @gibby mentioned. There are not as many “targeted” classes as you might find at an engineering school, the focus is on learning entire ideas and concepts that you can then apply as you wish in your own time. That being said, there are many clubs and societies on campus where you can learn how to apply those concepts and implement ideas, set up start-ups, and so on.
My son did the kind of curriculum that Telluric describes, at another Ivy, and works happily in the field.
The financial aid at Harvard is, as you well know, very very generous, as it is at certain other Ivies and colleges. You could also look at Amherst. Amherst also has great financial aid and is in a consortium with UMass Amherst, so students at Amherst can take CS classes at UMass as well as at Amherst.
In general, Harvard has been enhancing the applied elements of some areas of study, such as music, art, film and theater. Not sure if that is true with CS.
If your third kid likes math, then CS at Harvard would work wonderfully; if instead she wants direct access to work on designing video games, not so much. But I think that would be true at most good undergrad programs. Getting a foundation is important.
Many many thanks @Telluric and @compmom. She is talking advance math classes as compare to rest of the grades. She likes math but not keen in going beyond multi variable calculus. Her analytical and writing skills are great as she has won major awards besides math and science. after some experience she wants to join a start up. In reality she is her own boss as I can only tell her, but she is the one who decides ultimately where to graduate. This thread has been very informative for people like me who does not have a clue about Computer Science.
@ClassicRockerDad that is a great, my kids took classes in cross registration. But what sucks in past that a course taken MIT does not count towards Harvard GPA.
@ClassicRockerDad Well our problem is when you score all As in MIT classes and it does not count. It The problem comes for summer jobs you have to do more than get good scores in classroom. To get into cutting edge jobs, you have to read constantly beyond class subjects. It is stressful to be do classes and what is required in the job field.
Well, @ClassicRockerDad is correct - Harvard has more grade inflation. However, MIT courses for the concentration do get factored into the Harvard GPA. Of course, the hard part is one needs to get accepted to Harvard first.
