LACs with good CS programs

Obviously this is a really broad topic but I don’t really know where to start. I think I want to major in CS (I know a bit of programming and am planning to take a CS class next year as a senior), but I also really want to go to a LAC. I am absolutely in love with Harvey Mudd, but I am hoping to find other (and less selective) schools that have strong CS programs. I love reading and writing, and having a strong foundation in humanities is important to me, and I really don’t want that to mean receiving a worse CS education. I live in NJ, and while I couldn’t mind going as far as HMC, I would also like some options closer to home.

Any recommendations would be fantastic! If you want an idea about my stats, I have a 3.9 UW and 4.4 W GPA. 2110 old SAT, 1470 PSAT, and hopefully 1500+ new SAT.

To close, I’ve read other forum posts about this, but I found a lot of replies listing the disadvantages of pursuing CS at a LAC. I understand that those disadvantages are valid and need to be considered, but if you’re planning on typing a long-winded explanation as to why a large research university is a better fit for a CS major, please save your time and energy and move on to a different post.

@ucbalumnus has made a great thread for exactly this:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/math-computer-science-majors/1814245-computer-science-at-some-smaller-schools-including-liberal-arts-colleges-p1.html

Reading through that will offer at the very least a good list of CS programs at LAC’s.

Thank you! That’s exactly the kind of info I was looking for!

I can’t comment on the strength of its CS program, but University of Puget Sound (one of the 40 Colleges That Change Lives) is in Tacoma, WA, in Microsoft’s & Boeing’s backyard.

We’ve just gone through the process of trying to identify LACs with strong CS programs and here are the things we’ve done to aid in that effort:

  1. Go to departmental websites and see how many CS faculty there are. I consider anything less than three as quite weak, and even three is pretty paltry. Four and higher is starting to get fairly robust. Some of the biggest departments I’ve identified are Swarthmore (10), Carleton (9), Williams (8, and hiring more), Trinity U in TX (8), and, relevant perhaps to you based on your username, some of the women’s colleges like Wellesley and Smith. I haven’t looked at Harvey Mudd, but I’m sure they’re way up there.

  2. Go to the department of Ed’s College Navigator site (http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/) and see how many CS majors graduated last year. Enter the college name, and then click on programs and majors to see this info. I like to see number of majors in the double digits.

  3. Consult @ucbalumnus’s excellent table of upper level CS electives. Schools you’re seriously interested in are worth delving into on your own. How many intro CS sections do they have? Does it look like there’s a separate intro track for majors and non-majors (a good thing, with so many folks these days thinking they ought to take at least one CS class while they’re in college). Do the offer courses in niche areas that you think you might potentially be interested in (e.g. security or game design)?

Another question worth grappling with: what’s your financial situation? Are you going to require a lot of need-based aid (in which case schools that promise to meet full need are best), or are you full-pay but don’t really want to spend $60K+/year (in which case schools that offer merit aid are especially desirable) or is money truly no object?

Here are a few other strong programs to consider (this list is by no means comprehensive):
Oberlin
Vassar
U. of Richmond
Wesleyan
Denison
Grinnell

And, in reference to @GMTplus7’s post, UPS does have quite a good department, with five faculty, lots of majors, a solid selection of upper level electives and strong connections to the Seattle tech community. UPS and Trinity U are both very high on my son’s list right now (we were looking for schools that aren’t super selective and offer merit aid, along with a number of other criteria I won’t bore you with).

LAC’s are wildly hiring more CS faculty right now as it increases in popularity as a major. More and more schools are building strong departments. There are a lot of good options out there. You should be able to identify a number of good schools with a range of selectivity, and can even afford to be choosy about other aspects of the college experience, like campus culture. Good luck!

Professors from the following LACs appear to be among the first to have designed a model CS curriculum for liberal arts colleges. These schools may therefore offer some of the more established programs of their type (listed in approximate order of key upper-level courses offered at least biennially):

Hamilton
Swarthmore
Williams
Grinnell
Allegheny
Vassar
Washington & Lee
Colgate
Denison
Amherst
Bowdoin

(Sources: The Liberal Arts Computer Science consortium and table provided by ucbalumnus.)

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