Instate UCI CS Vs. Purdue CS - Help choosing !

College Search & Selection
1

These are our top two currently:

UCI CHC Program with Regents+Deans scholarship

Vs.

Purdue CS. (we have not visited due to Covid)

Questions:

  1. Are the advantages of CHC@ UCI good enough to balance out or weigh more than the cons of Purdue being OOS ?

  2. Regardless of considering any scholarship or instate/OOS :
    -Which of the CS undergrad degree is more reputable than other ? (Has good reputation with companies generally and internship opps?)

  • If were in our shoes, which would you be your choice ?
2

How big is the difference in net price? How much debt (if any) at each college?

Do you want to work in California or the Midwest after graduation? There may be some regional advantage in recruiting by smaller to medium sized companies that may not have the need or resources to recruit nationally.

3

These schools’ CS programs, as a general consideration, appear to be equivalent.

4

@ucbalumnus Thanks . Just with straight net price comparison, UCI definitely is the win for us. But I am giving the academic program a higher priority than cost alone.

@merc81 Good to know generally considering , both school programs are not very different.

5

UCI + Regents+ CHC would be at least as good as Purdue because of UCI’s location + advantages of CHC. Purdue v. UCI alone academically I’d pick Purdue.
In addition, because we don’t know how the current crisis is going to hit and when it’ll end, the cheaper option would likely be the best, long-term. The money saved could be the difference between being able to finish college without debt or having to drop out, or could be the difference between choosing the best job after college without any worry as to where it is(for instance).

6

Thank you . But can anyone explain why would US News latest rankings rank Purdue CS higher (20th ) than UCI (30th) : https://premium.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings , if the Acceptance % of UCI is way less(22%) than Purdue’s around 35% or even more making UCI CS a hard to get in program than Purdue’s ? what gives? Thanks !

7

For CS, don’t get caught up in rankings. And anyway, please notice that the rankings you linked to are for graduate programs, not undergraduate. Undergrad CS programs are difficult to rank since so much depends on teaching quality, which is very hard to quantify. For me, class size is a big deal, but it might not be for others. Graduate programs are mostly based on things like the amount and kind of research coming out of them, which doesn’t necessarily correlate highly with undergraduate teaching quality.

I haven’t specifically looked at their programs and compared, but generally I recommend that if you’re choosing between undergrad CS programs, see if one of them offers a specialty track, such as games or data science, that the other doesn’t. Otherwise, for a standard, vanilla CS undergraduate degree, both UCI and Purdue are going to be in the same tier. So there’s no big advantage to going to one over the other in terms of reputation.

8

Quality of undergraduate education in a given major depends mainly on two general classes of characteristics:

  • Academic content. Comparing that requires an expert in the field to compare curricula, courses, and syllabi of each college's department and make judgements about its quality, relevance, and coverage of important areas and topics in the field. Also, quality may also depend on subarea interests, post-graduation goals for typical industry jobs versus pre-PhD / research directions, etc.. Because of the need for expert evaluation, this aspect is often mostly ignored or hand-waved (e.g. by assuming that a more selective college has better or more academic content, or by assuming that graduate / research ranking = undergraduate ranking, although neither of these assumptions is necessarily true).
  • Format, environment, etc.. This includes aspects like class sizes, class format (faculty and TA use), regular versus adjunct faculty, frequency of offering of each course, whether courses tend to get full, etc.. This is often focused on here at the college level, rather than the department level. Some of this information can be researched by going to department web sites, class schedules, etc..