Posted this in the computer science forum as well:
I know, I know before I get the plethora of “There are better CS schools not in the Ivy league”.,let me explain. My S is a recruited athlete for football and wants to play at the highest level possible at a high academic institution. So down the line schools such as Stanford, Cal, Washington, Duke etc…may be in play but at this point(current sophomore) the interest has come from mainly Ivy league and D3 schools(MIT, CMU). Thus we are trying to narrow down the list strictly for Ivy schools at this point keeping in mind his fit for football, coaching staff etc…
So if you have any insight or advice as to which schools might be best for him please feel free. At this point he seems to be gravitating towards software development. Overall is there 1 school that has a distinct advantage over the others in CS? I’m not sure but I think Dartmouth is the only Ivy that operates on a quarter system which may help for football but it’s CS program isn’t the best from what I understand. Cornell, Princeton and Brown seem to be considered the best with Harvard making a strong push(the addition of the new building in Allston and the adding of 5 of the top respected CS faculty…Boaz Barak from Princeton, Scott Kuindersma, James Mickens, Alexander (Sasha) Rush and Madhu Sudan Adjunct Professor at MIT). He has had the opportunity to visit Cornell, Dartmouth and Princeton and seems to like the rural/suburban locations but he will get the chance this summer to visit Harvard and PENN to get a comparison. At PENN he is looking more towards the M&T program as opposed to strictly CS. Princeton has the distinction of being one of the best undergraduate focus colleges in the nation which is a consideration as well.
Congratulations on the options your son is having.
If you look at USNWR graduate ranking for CS, the order is approximately as follows:
Cornell
Princeton
Columbia
Harvard
Brown
UPenn
Yale
Dartmouth
(Blanks denote significant difference in rankings). Yale isn’t as far below UPenn, but it has been going down and the last rankings came out in 2014
Now, again as a reminder, these are graduate rankings .Dartmouth tends to be low ranked for graduate, but is strong for undergrad (I don’t know anything specifically about their CS undergrad though).
Overall, I will say that with exception of Yale, which have had some issues with CS departments, all are good options. One thing to consider is that CS is a very time consuming major, and D1 football with it can be hard (you almost never see it in Big 10 schools, though Ivies may be providing better academic-athletic balance). You may want to see where CS requirements are a bit thin, and it may be easier to balance sports and academics.
For a football athlete, Dartmouth has a theoretical advantage of being on the quarter system, so football season overlaps with only 1/3 of the academic year instead of 1/2. So a football athlete can theoretically load the more difficult or time consuming courses in terms that are not in the football season more easily under the quarter system than under the semester system.
@osuprof Thank you. Something to keep in mind regarding Yale.
@ucbalumnus True…so how much should the quarter system weigh in value compared to the overall strength of a higher ranked CS program? Same will have to be taken into account if say a Stanford comes into play. Quarter system but the rigor of CS and football at an FBS. How would you rank the current CS undergrad Ivy schools at this point?
The top 6 are all strong in CS.
Yale in AI. Dartmouth not so much.
But take a look at course sequencing and requirements as well. For example, the last 2 years of CS under Columbia SEAS’s recommended sequence looks brutal. I can’t see how a football player with those time commitments can do well with that.
A school where you just have to take 12 CS classes to pick up a CS major may be better for a football player.
Just be aware that the Ivies also are D1, and will demand a lot more “football time” out of its athletes than the top D3 schools. I would consider the Ivies for sure, but I also would consider the top D3 schools like Amherst, Williams and the other NESCAC schools, MIT, UChicago, Johns Hopkins. The athletes there are students first, athletes second. At the Ivies, its not so clear where the division lies. And at D1 schools, even great ones like Stanford, Cal and Duke, they will athletes first and students second (or even third).
When looking at the course sequencing, pay attention to what high-workload courses must be taken in fall semesters or quarters (during football season), and what high-workload courses can be shifted to other terms.
At undergraduate level, things like residential environment, quality of peers, flexibility in classes, overall reputation, cost, etc. are going to matter far more than CS Department rankings, which are biased heavily toward larger departments.
As @PurpleTitan pointed out, ivies with CS Departments ranked ‘lower’ do just as well in CS Recruiting. For instance, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are consistently among the top 10 employers at Yale. If you look at where CS professors did their bachelors, there’s almost no correlation with US News Rankings: http://cs.brown.edu/people/alexpap/faculty_dataset.html, especially if you account for the number of CS Majors at each school.
@PurpleTitan This is feeders for Phd. Some other ivies have bigger tradition in sending grads to industry not grad school. But in any case all of these schools do well. I don’t think the rankings discount Brown and Cornell, they both have good positions in most major rankings. Cornell especially is probably the overall strongest ivy in CS.
Brown’s CS department is fantastic for undergraduate teaching. In addition to the Sc.B. degree, it offers an A.B. degree in CS which has fewer course requirements. However, most CS courses are only offered one semester each year so there isn’t much scheduling flexibility.
So I assume then that since the rigors of football and CS is a concern then even considering doing football and the M&T program at PENN would be out of the question.
You might also look to see the other distribution requirements. Using Cornell as an example, the CS major is housed in both Arts & Science and Engineering. The CS major in A&S will have a foreign language requirement while the CS major in Engineering may have physics. (Not sure if Physics, but Engineering distribution requirements as opposed to A&S distribution requirements.)
Columbia has a CS-Math major in the College, so all the requirements of the 14 Core classes whereas students who elect to study CS in Engineering at Columbia will have fewer Core requirements.
These differences may exist at the other Ivies also, but these are the ones I have heard my son mention to me. Hopefully I am not too far off with my details!
Yale is growing their program.
I think I recall hearing that Dartmouth’s CS is less theoretical, more hands-on.
In practice, hundreds of schools have good CS majors (though some schools which are high ranked in general do not have very good CS majors). A football athlete who wants to be successful academically in CS needs to carefully consider the workload management of both football (particularly during the fall) and CS courses that have programming projects and hence high workloads.
No to both. The difficulty of a CS program depends on a lot of things and takes a lot more investigating to truly find the source of often. Student culture can often be a big part of it.