<p>I urge you to look into New Mexico tech. Potentially, without financial aid, the total bill for NMT will be ~$9k a year. That is, I assume you son gets WUE (I got it, and my friend got it). That brings the tuition down to a manageable $7K a year. Housing is cheap at around $2K. I mean this is pretty much the cheapest option for me, even cheaper than the UCs.</p>
<p>edit: saw your “no tech school” requirement… Leaving it here just for others to know.</p>
<p>CS by itself is not stressful. Either one groks how to write code or they don’t. The stress is usually due to the insistence of CS depts to make CS more of a science by adding math onto it, never mind they’ll never get used in real life… </p>
<p>CS was stressful back in the dark ages 30 years ago when one only had Usenet to rely on for answers (or mailing lists or similar), software tools and debuggers that look outright primitive by today’s standards, languages and design methodologies that are ancient by today’s standards, and only a few feet of manuals compared to online queries. Not to mention a terminal on a timeshared system in a 24/7 terminal room versus a laptop in one’s own dorm room.</p>
<p>If there is one major that can’t even begin to comprehend how well they have it, it’s CS :-)</p>
<p>My nephew, who like your son had excellent grades and decent-but-not-stellar SAT scores, is thriving at Rochester Institute of Technology, majoring in CS with a game design emphasis. RIT has a strong co-op program and excellent job placement for its graduates. He also considered Worcester Poly and, I believe, Georgia Tech.</p>
<p>Came back to this thread after dinner and saw twp posts (10 and 11) that i swear were not there when i answered before. I’m losing it.<br>
Thank you all. These insights really help, as well as the new schools to consider. </p>
<p>spurster: you addressed a question I have really been wondering about. Washington state doesn’t have the best rep in general, so I was not anxious to send son there. There is also Western Washington, but it is quite a bit smaller and i think the course offerings would be limited. Does anyone know more about U Oregon?</p>
<p>Treetop, I think my son would be fine with the science classes. He would just love a break from reading, actually :)</p>
<p>ucbalumnus: from what I’ve been reading, if a kid gets a B in physics, it could knock him out of the running for admission into UW CS. I probably should talk to an advisor.</p>
<p>mom2collegekids: what’s my budget? haha. I said i hadn’t wanted to spend full freight again. That is why we would have pushed hard for the state school (whereas my daughter had been dead set against staying here and wanted a major that wasn’t offered at any of the state schools. Of course, she is not pursuing work in that field now. But that’s a separate, very long thread…) We can probably pay full freight again. But (and this may be heresy to say on CC), I really don’t see any UG education being worth a quarter million dollars (including airfare 
). It makes me ill to even think it. And you are correct: to pay that much as an out of state student in a public school is even more distasteful. Our timing seems to always be off.</p>
<p>Anyway, my son doesn’t actually have any SAT scores yet. Those numbers are what I am predicting. He is practicing from the blue book when he gets a chance. Winter break will be lots of SAT fun. But I think his ability to raise the verbal beyond around 620 is unlikely. The plan is for him to take his first SAT in January and then study over the summer and take again in October. He tends to make careless mistakes on the math (or not understand the wording in the question, occasionally), so he will probably be low 700s at best. He tends to be overly literal sometimes. It gets him into trouble. You mentioned that MIT had the best parties, according to your nephew. My daughter went to BU and she said the same thing:)</p>
<p>Jingle, how does your nephew find the environment there? Are there any girls???</p>
<p>davidthefat, Yo are the first person i have ever heard of who was able to use WUE. Thank you for the reminder that that is an option. (although, yes, we are leaning away from tech schools).</p>
<p>turbo, I think you are probably right that the CS major has changed tremendously over time. It makes my heart sing to see that my DS enjoys programming so much. he can sit for hours trying to figure out how to write code for a project he is doing on his own. But ask him to go read his history book and I find him an hour later staring into space…
So, definitely no LACs with classics requirements on our list!</p>
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<p>Ha Turbo, I agree, but I think I predate your scenario. The punched card lab closed for a few hours every night…</p>
<p>I have so many thoughts on the CS major. One thought - at the big Midwestern ranked school I attended, there were some very, very geeky students the likes of which I never saw in the work force. That is to say, they were too weird to work I guess, or too weird to be hired. It was as though a whole layer of people vanished between college and work. I’ve often wondered if people at other schools notice this.</p>
<p>My other thought is from the standpoint of someone who worked really, really hard to get that quality degree from the hard school to find myself working side by side with grads of a whole range of degrees and schools, some of which could not possibly have been as demanding as ours. Same job, same pay. I’ve concluded that you should attend whatever program fits you best, allows you to get the degree, and worry less about pedigree, since - unless you are talking about the tippy top google-type jobs - managers will hire from a range of schools.</p>
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<p>Now that is ridiculous.</p>
<p>Good point, Treetop. My son just competed in a programming competition last weekend. I was talking to another parent as we waited for them to finish up (not really a spectator sport). He works at Microsoft and said that they hire kids from all schools. That what matters is basic intelligence and training and the ability to work in a team. He said they can teach the rest. I didn’t know if this was generally applicable to most CS jobs, but what you say sort of confirms this.</p>
<p>@mommeleh, some of us actually enjoyed our LAC courses and to be brutally honest, found them more useful than the litany of useless Math etc courses shoved upon us by the school. See, comp sci, especially at the face to face level of collecting requirements and thinking about a problem, is all about general, wide knowledge and the ability to learn. Not to mention the ability to digest huge volumes (customer requirements, for example) and be able to relate to what customers want. (substitute customers for users). </p>
<p>So, at the end, a well rounded LAC education as part of a comp sci degree is in my view far more useful than going the engineering track and learning the engineering aspects of things, only to find out that engineering courses do nothing to fill the gap between users and developers. </p>
<p>My first degree was Civil Engineering so when I continued on to undergrad Comp Sci I had no math/science courses to take and took 2 years worth of LAC and comp sci classes. Absolutely loved it. At the end of the day one has to be able to relate to the end user, and again, in my view, LAC is very helpful.</p>
<p>The other aspect of LAC is the (hopefully heavy-handed) requirement of LAC schools to teach English, and LOTS of it. I’m a darned good software developer, don’t get me wrong, but I am far better as a writer than as a coder; code gets the job done, but writing gets you the customers to begin with. I spend my 8 hours a day writing code, but seem to always attract writing duties as well…</p>
<p>So, I would not eliminate LAC’s with good science/math programs from a comp sci school search… Comp sci with a good background in useful LAC subjects (econ, finance, biology, statistics, and the like) is quite useful.</p>
<p>I’m a UW CSE student - a direct admit. Please feel free to PM me or come join us in the UW subforum for more information about CSE! We always have a few students interested in the department.</p>
<p>When the article came out, it literally spread like wildfire through the students on Facebook. Within an hour, I had over 25 friends in the major share the article… obviously there are many more who have read and made opinions.</p>
<p>Some current pre-majors who hope to join our CSE department were disheartened by the article… especially with grades just coming out, such as math and physics. A few of my friends figured they should just major in EE or AA instead of CSE… since it seemed like it would be easier to get into those departments.</p>
<p>After talking to many students about this and drawing from my own experiences, the article makes it sound a bit more terrible than it is; not everyone in the intro classes are planning on majoring in CSE. You have the random business majors who need Areas of Knowledge credits. You have the EE students who need to take the intro series. You have the aspiring AA students who chose to take CSE over AMATH. A lot of the engineering students end up taking at least CSE 142 (first intro course), whether or not they are serious about majoring in it.</p>
<p>Of the people who take CSE 142, a good number of them decide it’s not for them. That’s why CSE 143, the second intro course, is a lot smaller than CSE 142. Still, in 143, there are many “I don’t care about majoring in this” people. I still know some business majors who happily and easily get 4.0’s in 142 and 143.</p>
<p>Then, when you have filtered out all other students, you have everyone else trying to get into the major. It’s difficult; that’s true. There’s a reason it’s a very competitive major in terms of admissions. However, the article makes it sound like you <em>must</em> have a 4.0 in almost everything, and that everyone in our major scored 4.0’s in both intro courses. When I took the intro courses, about 10/400-600 students (sometimes 1 lecture, sometimes 2 lectures) received 4.0’s. It is impossible for all of us to have a 4.0. Some of us scored a 3.6 in the intro courses and still got in. The admissions department looks holistically at a student’s application; this is why we even have a personal statement. </p>
<p>Through the personal statement, students show their true colors. I know several 4.0 students who were rejected because their applications were half-heartedly written, showing the lack of excitement for the field. Some students apply to the major just to see what happens… they’re not that serious about it. Some students who have actually FAILED the intro courses are accepted after retaking the classes and showing their passion for computer science. Perhaps per each admissions cycle, we only accept 1/5 students. However, many, <em>many</em> students apply multiple times. Our overall admissions rate is 51% of applicants. </p>
<p>Just some stats from the advisors:
For fall of 2010, there were about 1000 freshman applicants who showed interest in either CS or CE based on their freshman application.
32 students were given direct admission. (Usually around 30 students each year)
We have 160 students per graduating year in the undergraduate department. They’d love to have more, but because we don’t have enough money for more classes, which are already being overfilled by at least 20 students per class each quarter, we can’t increase that amount.</p>
<p>Anyway, this post is getting a bit long; sorry! Again, I extend an invitation for you to come join our UW forum (we have many threads on the department) as well as PMing me if you have any specific questions.</p>
<p>turbo, i was definitely not minimizing the value of an LAC education. I was responding to an earlier post suggesting that science courses can prove overwhelming. In my son’s case, I know he wouldn’t make it past the first semester at a place with heavy duty literature requirements. It is clearly important to be an articulate writer/communicator in all fields. I would hope that wherever he goes, my son would get instruction in that area. Can you recommend some good LACs (with admission stats in my son’s ballpark)that would be good for CS?</p>
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<p>They were too geeky to move on to the real world, actually. There were people in my class years that were there before me, and graduated well after I left. Extremely smart kids, I learned a lot from them, but they could not see themselves working in the ‘real world’. Again, in today’s world, they would not have this problem - I would love to hire kids like these (Embedded Linux anyone? drop me a line :-))</p>
<p>I agree about the pedigree also. After Cajun State I got a job in a major research lab and worked side by side with people from all kinds of CC-approved schools. At the end we got the job done. The degree’s pedigree seemed to be more helpful in getting a job than in doing a job…</p>
<p>The worst part - comparative difficulty of assignments. We were not amused to find out that while Cajun State was ranked in the world’s top 1,000,000 universities (I think :-)), our friends who attended well regarded and ranked schools like CWRU, U Mich, U Waterloo, and UT Austin had it far easier than we did assignments wise. We’d go visit them, stroll around the CS building, look at assignments posted on profs’ doors, and weep knowing that we did the same assignments as well, except at Cajun State it was individual assignments versus team assignments at the ranked schools (*)</p>
<p>(*) the explanation came a few years later, since the ‘team programming’ craze took a few years to permeate from the top ranked schools to the ‘schools you probably will not find mentioned in CC’ :-)</p>
<p>These were the days… Honeywell hardware, Multics OS, PL/1, and crayfish etoufe.</p>
<p>I was doing some Googling on the issue of LAC’s and Comp Sci and found this very well written article that more or less echoes my feelings…</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~walker/cs-liberal-arts.pdf[/url]”>http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~walker/cs-liberal-arts.pdf</a></p>
<p>Thank you, speedsolver. That was critically important info. I will say, though, that the advisors made it sound like 1/3 of those who want admission are admitted. 51% sounds a helluva lot better. We live close to the UW, my husband is faculty there, and we would really love for our son to be able to attend and take advantage of an excellent education in his chosen field. I will PM you directly or go to other forum later. Right now the dog is really needing to go out!</p>
<p>Wow. will read that later, turbo. Grinnell was a school i originally had on the list because i thought my son would fit in very well socially. But was concerned about the CS. The dog is literally squeezing her legs shut. Gotta go…</p>
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<p>LACs do not necessarily have heavy breadth (or humanities and social studies) requirements. Amherst has no breadth requirements, for example (but don’t go there for CS – its CS course offerings are very limited). Meanwhile, MIT has relatively heavy breadth requirements in both the math and science areas and the humanities and social studies areas.</p>
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<p>You may want to check school catalogs to see if writing intensive courses have a choice of subject matter to write about, rather than only literary analysis. If he is not into literature, he may still find writing intensive courses on other subjects interesting and take more of them, if they are available.</p>
<p>Grinnell’s CS courses are listed here:</p>
<p>[Computer</a> Science - Catalog | Grinnell College](<a href=“http://www.grinnell.edu/academic/catalog/academic-program/courses/cs]Computer”>http://www.grinnell.edu/academic/catalog/academic-program/courses/cs)</p>
<p>Note that many of the upper level courses are not offered every year, and only two of them are offered every semester.</p>
<p>What about USC? Would merit aid be a possibility there?</p>
<p>It sounds to me like mommeleh’s son would be best off taking the engineering CS major route if science is a strength and reading is more of a challenge.</p>