<p>Hey guys..I am going to attend Hofstra University very soon and I am undecided at this moment about my major. They do have a computer science major but the problem is ..it's not ABET accredited. Will this make a difference? How bad of a disadvantage will this be for me ?? Finally, Do you think I could transfer out of Hofstra after my first year to join another college? How does that process actually work? Thanks.</p>
<p>I don't know since mine's was ABET accredited. It might affect your initial employment options, I guess. I would probably suggest transferring to an ABET-accredited program.</p>
<p>ABET accreditation, or the lack thereof, is a sigificant issue in traditional engineering fields that are subject to state regulation (civil, mechanical, electrical, etc). However, ABET accreditation has little or no value in computer science, which is essentially unregulated.</p>
<p>For proof, go to abet.org and check their [url=<a href="http://www.abet.org/accreditcac.asp%5Dlist%5B/url">http://www.abet.org/accreditcac.asp]list[/url</a>] of all accredited computer science programs. You will immediately notice that many of the top CS programs in the country are not listed, including schools like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Caltech, Wisconsin, and the entire Ivy League. All of these schools are ABET-accredited in traditional engineering disciplines, but they don't bother when it comes to computer science. </p>
<p>Hofstra is similar. Their engineering programs are ABET-accredited. Their CS programs are not. I wouldn't worry about it.</p>
<p>In summary, I suspect that few, if any, employers care about ABET accreditation in CS. They definitely do in civil engineering, but not in CS.</p>
<p>You learn something new everyday</p>
<p>I wholeheartedly agree... ABET doesn't matter for CS.</p>
<p>ABET accreditation matters for CE, ChE, ME and EE only. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>And AE, NE, MatE, CompE.. ..etc I think it matters for most or all the engineering disciplines.</p>
<p>If you are studying in a traditional engineering discipline subject to state licensing, then you want an ABET degree. There are two reasons for this. </p>
<p>First, if you ever do pursue a PE license, you will be at a disadvantage without an ABET degree. The extent of the disadvantage varies, depending on your state licensing laws. At best, you will be required to get extra work experience to qualify for the PE exam. At worst, you will be automatically rejected. Granted, most engineers do not pursue the PE license.</p>
<p>But second, virtually all "mainstream" engineering schools are ABET-accredited in traditional engineering disciplines, because they know that at least some of their graduates will want to get licensed some day. If a school offers a non-ABET degree program in a field like civil or mechanical engineering, then something is probably wrong. Schools that do this are typically outside the academic mainstream, like certain religious schools, or correspondence schools, or outright diploma mills. The engineering community is generally not very accepting of unaccredited degrees from "alternative" schools, even in situations where PE licensure is rare. </p>
<p>Now, if you are studying in an engineering discipline that is <em>not</em> subject to state licensing, then ABET accreditation may not be valuable. For example, no state licenses biomedical engineers. Some perfectly respectable schools, like MIT, have unaccredited BME programs. CS is the same way.</p>
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And AE, NE, MatE, CompE..
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<p>MatE? I highly doubt that. Berkeley and Stanford have highly prominent MatE programs that are nonetheless unaccredited. Yet it seems to me that very few students will turn down Stanford or Berkeley for a no-name MatE program that is accredited.</p>
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etc I think it matters for most or all the engineering disciplines
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<p>Again, I doubt that. It only seems to matter with CivE's and to a minor extent ME's and ChemE's. The fact is, most engineers work for large private employers that don't care about accreditation. The computer industry, which hires many EE's and CompE's cares very little about accreditation. Heck, they care very little about formal engineering degrees at all, which is why people like Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison can start supremely successful computer companies despite not only not having accredited engineering degrees, but without having a college degree at all. That is why Intel, one of the largest engineering companies in history, could be founded by 2 guys who do not have engineering degrees (Noyce's and Moore's degrees are in physics and chemistry, not engineering). For many years, the head of Engineering at Google was Wayne Rosing, a guy who never graduated from college. </p>
<p>Similarly, the biotech industry is filled with employees who don't have ABET accredited engineering degrees. Instead, they mostly have backgrounds in biology, chemistry, genetics, computer science, and the like. </p>
<p>The point is, there are entire swaths of private industry sectors that do not care about engineering accreditation. Government work seems to be where accreditation really matters.</p>
<p>The following is an opinion with no anedoctal basis only my guess: Computer Science is one of those disciplines where you want the professors to be top of their field and to really care. It gets really complicated and really convoluted really fast. You need to be in a top program or you'll get a watered down education.</p>
<p>To extend Scorp's point, one of the reasons for the dilution is simply market forces: competent programmers and computer scientists are in high demand in industry. Most universities can't hire anybody experienced at the limited salary scales of junior faculty.</p>
<p>And bringing the thread back to home*, the quality of the professors -- nay, the entire CS program -- has very little or nothing to do with whether the program is ABET accredited, so don't worry about it.</p>
<p>(*The circle is now complete.)</p>
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one of the reasons for the dilution is simply market forces: competent programmers and computer scientists are in high demand in industry. Most universities can't hire anybody experienced at the limited salary scales of junior faculty.
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<p>Well, I'm not sure I completely buy this. The fact is, there are plenty of highly competent newly minted CS PhD's who want to get a job in academia but don't get any offers and so move on to industry. Heck, I know 2 brilliant and highly affable new PhD's who are graduating from MIT, clearly one of the best CS schools in the world, who couldn't get a single decent academic position and have therefore decided to take industry jobs as their second-choice. </p>
<p>You have to keep in mind that the life of a CS academic is actually extremely pleasant. Getting tenure is painful, I agree, but once you get tenure, it's all gravy. After all, getting tenure means that you're now unfireable. A lot of computer scientists and programmers painfully learned the value of unfireability during the tech crash of 2001. </p>
<p>Furthermore, most tenured CS profs at any half-decent school can make a substantial amount of money from outside consulting, often times equally several multiples of their faculty salary. This is especially so if you happen to specialize in a hot field. For example, any CS prof whose research has anything to do with algorithmic search has almost certainly been offered extremely lucrative consulting opportunities with the major Internet search companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (through MSN). Heck, many CS profs become extremely wealthy by founding their own companies. For example, the computer security company RSA Security was founded by 3 computer science professors (the "R", "S", and "A"). For those who don't know what RSA is, RSA basically offers many of the core technologies that serve to secure digital communications, such as digital signatures, encrypted websites for e-commerce, and so forth. The company has made millionaires out of its 3 founders, who still teach CS to this day. </p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Security%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Security</a></p>
<p>The point is, being a CS academic is a pretty good gig, if you can get it, and particularly if you can get tenure. Even if you don't make it to tenure, you can always say that you were a former CS prof. That looks excellent on the resume.</p>
<p>To my surprise, I just stumbled across one situation where ABET accreditation actually does matter for computer science degrees.</p>
<p>If you want to pursue a career as a patent professional (e.g. patent attorney or patent agent), then you probably want an undergraduate degree that will qualify for the USPTO's "Patent Bar" exam. Under current USPTO</a> criteria, a CS degree qualifies, but only if it is ABET-accredited.</p>
<p>Obviously most CS students are not pursuing this particular career path, but this unusual case should be noted for the sake of completeness.</p>
<p>Well, Corbett, even that I would say is not going to snag too many people. According to the USPTO link, computer science grads who don't have ABET accredited degrees can nonetheless still qualify Category B as long as they have earned enough units in various technical disciplines. The fact is, most CS programs, even the unaccredited ones, will require students to take enough technical courses so as to satisfy one of the options in Category B (probably option 4). </p>
<p>For example, let's say that you go to MIT and you earn a degree in course 18C (Mathematics with Computer Science). This is MIT's "pure" computer science degree and is unaccredited, as opposed to the EECS degree which is a true engineering degree. However, to complete a degree in course 18C requires that you take a number of courses that almost certainly will fulfill Category B, option 4 of the USPTO criteria. For example, they all have to take 8 semester units of physics, with lab. They have to take 32 semester units of computer science that satisfy the criteria designated in section B.x. </p>
<p>And even for those few CS students with unaccredited degrees and who are lacking in technical units, to fulfill option B, you can always just take a few more classes later, in community college at night, or even during the summer after undergrad, and before law school. Nobody says that you have to have fulfilled these requirements as part of your undergrad program. You can do them afterwards.</p>
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Well, Corbett, even that I would say is not going to snag too many people.
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Oh, I fully agree -- the USPTO's apparent preference for ABET CS degrees is of very limited practical significance. I only brought it up because I was so surprised to find an example of anyone that preferred ABET CS degrees.</p>