<p>Hi. I'm a High School Junior intending to major in computer science. I've looked at lots of schools and have found most of the one's I like, but I'm hoping to narrow down the one's I'm looking at. I have a moderately large list of schools and I'd really love advice on which schools I should definitely look into or which ones won't be great for me. I'm looking primarily for a school with good academics, but being in/near a large urban center is a big plus.</p>
<p>GPA: 3.55 U/W 4.20 W
SAT: 730 Math 700 Reading 620 Writing</p>
<p>The schools I'm looking at:
*Carnegie Mellon Univ (First choice, reach)
*Case Western Reserve Univ
*Georgia Inst of Tech
*Indiana U Bloomington
*Michigan State Univ
*New York Univ
*Northeastern Univ
*Pennsylvania State Univ
*Purdue Univ
*Rutgers New Brunswick
*U of IL Urbana-Champaign
*U of MA Amherst
*U of Michigan
*U of Minnesota Twin Cities
*U of North Carolina Chapel Hill
*U of Rochester
*U of Southern California
*U of Texas Austin
*U of Washington
*U of Wisconsin Madison
*UC Los Angeles
*UC San Diego
*UMD College Park
*Virginia Tech</p>
<p>I'd appreciate any and all advice on these schools. Thanks!</p>
<p>Cost constraints? State of residency? Which do you consider your safeties that you are sure to be admitted to and sure that you can afford?</p>
<p>Run the net price calculator on each school’s web site. If not affordable, check for whether the school offers reachable merit scholarships that will make it affordable. If not affordable even with the maximum reachable merit scholarships, remove from the list.</p>
<p>I recommend talking to your parents and running the numbers early. No sense in spending a lot of time researching a school only to find it unaffordable later. It may also be a big letdown to get excited about a school and then find it unaffordable later.</p>
<p>Look at numbers concurrently. There is no point to making a list that includes UCs, for instance, if your parents aren’t going to pay full price of $55,000 oos because you aren’t going to get any money from them.</p>
<p>UIUC probably has a stronger CS program than any school on your list (except CMU) and at the lowest prices to boot (for an Illinois resident paying full sticker price at any of them). Wisconsin, Maryland or UMass might be nearly as good, but then you’d be paying ~$40K- $50K more (over 4 years) for the same kind of program at a similar school. You’d pay double at USC, NYU or Rochester for CS programs that may not even be as strong. </p>
<p>Apply to Illinois during the priority filing period. Then you’ll have a decision by mid-December, which will allow time to apply to less selective schools if you get bad news. </p>
<p>^^what tk21769 said. as far as large urban areas, you’ve got plenty of good academics on this list, so you can toss PSU, UMass, UMich, and VTech. UIUC is really looking very good if you can get in.</p>
<p>“UIUC probably has a stronger CS program than any school on your list (except CMU) and at the lowest prices to boot (for an Illinois resident paying full sticker price at any of them).”</p>
<p>When it comes to the schools under consideration, the ARWU rankings have CMU, Texas, UCLA, USC, and UCSD rated higher than Illinois in CS. None of them is worth paying much of a premium though, and I don’t think the OP would have much of a chance of getting accepted to one of them, anyway.</p>
<p>CMU is likely out of reach (CMU CS has a ~6% admit rate).
CWR is a match to low reach.
UIUC also but likely to be more affordable.
UMN is a match, probably affordable.</p>
<p>Drop the other schools, they’re not likely to be within reach or not worth paying the OOS premium. Or add a handful AFTER your list is completed.
For what it’s worth, according to The Bubblechart, Penn State is a match (GPA/test scores) for University Park, but unless your parents saved $45,000X4, it’s not worth paying that much.</p>
<p>^kathleentown: OP has GPA: 3.55 U/W 4.20 and SAT: 730 Math 700 Reading 620 Writing at a school (SCS) with a 6% admit rate , where the bottom 25% students score at the 780 level on their Math SAT and where median GPA is 3.88… OP has zero chance of getting in unless he’s grown a 100,000 dollar app business from his bedroom, and even then that’d probably fly better at Stanford or Olin.
OP can apply, of course, just to see, but needs better choices.</p>
<p>OP: ask for your parents’ tax return, run the net price calculators, and bring the results to your parents. Then have a talk with them about those results. DO NOT trust that they’ll “work it out”. It’s already started: kids who got into their first choice and parents suddenly realizing it’s not affordable, so the kids who didn’t look for financial safeties are stuck between two bad choices. Financial safeties are essential and for them to be safeties you need to know how much your parents can afford, whether you’ll need merit (which you can get at several schools), whether you’ll need a lot of need-based aid, etc.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus and MYOS: I had my first one on CC tonight. It’s so stressful. Youse have more experience than I. Is there any one posting to which you could point new people coming into this process and say “go read this (and then read it again)”?</p>
<p>Don’t let the grad school rankings factor in too much to your undergrad list…you don’t have to go to a college that has a number one grad school ranking to get a great CS education. If Op is even going to bother to come back?</p>
<p>thank you, uncbalumnus. I have bookmarked these. I was thinking more of a single gateway post along the lines of “abandon hope, all ye who enter, unless you read this post.”</p>
<p>I wonder if there’s ever been a poll of parents asking them, say, how much they’ll have to pay for their child to go to their state university flagship, the local LAC, and the ivy of the month, and then comparing their estimates against what the npc says. Or something like that. It’s amazing to me that an industry can charge such outrageous fees for services to buyers who are outrageously ignorant of what those services cost until after their child has been anointed to receive them. </p>
<p>I agree with the comment about not paying too much attention to rankings. I posted the ones earlier with the intention of demonstrating that they can be pretty inconsistent, and therefore, somewhat irrelevant.</p>
<p>If you go to any top 500 school, you should be fine with a CS degree.</p>
<p>As they go, CS careers are far more ‘school prestige blind’ and far more interested in your real life experience that you gain through the process, be it internships, actual jobs or school related efforts that have real world relationships. I’d really not get concerned about the rankings of one school over another - Find one you can afford and be happy with and go there. </p>
<p>But just make sure that it has all of the usual CS courses, offered at reasonable frequency. Yes, many people do self-educate a lot of CS and succeed in industry, but if you are going to school for CS, you might as well choose a school with a reasonably complete set of CS courses.</p>
<p>Whether a school has a reasonably complete set of CS courses offered at reasonable frequency, is not all that well correlated with general college prestige rankings.</p>