First @Knowsstuff didn’t say the OP would be wasting time in LSA. @Knowsstuff 's S spent at least one year in LSA and then transferred to CoE. I don’t think spending a year in LSA is “wasting time.” The CS coursework in both schools in the 1st year overlaps.
I’d disagree, at least with your first few years searching for jobs. Later down the road, once one has a resume of CS work, then it might not matter nearly as much. I’d ask for opinions in the engineering forum from members who hire in the industry.
According to their sites, LSA has an acceptance rate of 25% and the CoE’s acceptance rate is 19%. So, yes, your chances of being accepted to LSA are better than CoE, but I don’t think that’s an overwhelming difference.
@sushiritto Great find on the LSA stats! Even though I’m junior at UMich, I thought LSA didn’t post their stats.
@cderosia3jr Looks like CoE and LSA both have around 3.9. CoE SAT/ACT: 1440/34. LSA SAT/ACT: 1440/33. CoE takes fewer people because they have fewer seats, so yes, it is going to be a little more selective. If you’re fit to get through CS at UMich, you should be able to get into LSA or Engineering. Avoiding the school you actually want to be in because it is more selective will set up for failure; it is a major sign of imposter syndrome
This is not accurate. I’m in CoE, my gf is in LSA (CS), we have access to the same resources and take the same classes. When you meet with recruiters at career fair, they’ll take the most qualified candidate, irrespective of which school. If you go on LinkedIn, you will students from both schools placing at top tier companies.
I will add that the very best CoE CS students are more qualified than the very best LSA CS students. But the average CoE CS student and average LSA CS student are equals in terms of qualifications.
@liltiger30 Without actual placement statistics for LSA and CoE CS students, yours is an opinion, not fact.
I’ll continue to believe the CS student from CoE has more prestige. This is just my opinion, but isn’t still the case that the LSA CS student can avoid Calc, 3, 4, Physics 140/240 + labs, Chem Lab, + Engr 100? If so, to me, this makes the LSA-CS degree an easier path.
Any maybe that’s the great equalizer. “You” (the general “you,” not you specifically) will probably achieve a higher GPA with a CS-LSA degree, because you will avoid some very difficult math and science courses.
@sushiritto The classes you listed are the general CoE requirements, so of course a LSA CS student would not have to take those, and why would he/she? Those classes are not even difficult compared to the upper level CS courses. You make it sound like LSA CS is some sort of cake walk when the CS classes are pretty much the same. Not to add GPA is pretty much a non-factor unless it is below a 3.0. And really, having taken those classes, I know they are useless for CS.
The ECRC (Engineering Career Resource Center) has literally revealed that the difference in starting salary between CS-LSA and CS-ENG is marginal, but you probably wouldn’t know that since you don’t have any real affiliation with the school. That fact was even brought up in my EECS 280 class. Most people can’t even tell who’s CS-LSA or CS-ENG on campus, and 99% of percent recruiters do not care at all.
If you want to say CoE is more prestigious than LSA, that’s fair; the average CoE student is more intellilgble that the average LSA student. But I can assure just about anyone, no one cares if you’re CS-LSA or CS-ENG when it comes to job placement. And even if it were the case CS-ENG placed much better (which is not the case), it would be because of self-selection: the engineering students are often smarter. It would NOT be because of the degree!
So I didn’t say that actually. But as @sushiritto stated it’s not wasting a year. If you go the lsa route it is basically the same since your taking the same classes except for 2. One is an English class and one is engineering. My son took think it was engineering 183 python with C++ vs taking Matlab that the first year engineering students take. Other then that all classes are the same since LSA and Engineering take all their other core classes together. If straight into engineering there will be some engineering meetings etc just for engineering students. But my son won $15 000,in grants with a business student and started a student org in augmented Reality that is in its forth year now. Very active groups with conferences with like Microsoft Ford motor Co etc… So don’t see that as wasting a year. It actually opened up opportunities for him that he might have never known about. Remember… This is Michigan.
The GPA and Act is almost identical
My friends daughter is undecided with engineering but wants stem. She is applying LSA but will most likely follow the engineering curriculum. 4.0 unweighted with 34 Act. So she in theory could get into engineering directly.
Hope that helps.
Also evaluate your school acceptance to Michigan lsa vs engineering. Talk to your counselor. They should have the information
Again, no verifiable facts, just words on an internet page. Now, if you could post a link at a comparison, I’m happy to concede the point, but I don’t believe everything I read on the Internet.
Why would someone take those more difficult CoE coursework and the extra 8 units to graduate than let’s say LSA humanities courses? Well, if one is more math and science-oriented, which CS students tend to be, then they’d likely want to take Physics, Chem, Calc 3 &4, etc., which are extremely difficult courses.
As for not having any affiliation with the university, that’s a good one. Nice! Fair point. I only “write the checks” for tuition and living expenses for my OOS (CA) kid for 4 years. Do you know how much that is? That’s not exactly easy to do.
I’ve made my point. CoE will have more prestige and I believe that’ll make job searches easier and more lucrative, all things being equal, in the 1st few years.
Does a student need to worry about best fit when applying to CoE and LSA at Michigan?
I’m thinking of Cornell which also has CS in both schools but the applicant strengths and profiles are much different for CAS vs CoE. Students are encouraged to apply to the college that best fits their strengths. Adcoms are aware of those looking to game the system and those applicants are typically not admitted.
It sounds like @Knowsstuff’s son applied to LSA because that’s where he thought his major would be, not because it was an easier admit.
He was looking at Actuary Sciences and met with the head of the department of Actuary and Engineering in his junior year of high school. When he called engineering department to see if he could switch like the day after he sent in his application, they told him he needed to wait the year but take the courses needed. They asked his stats and they said he should of applied directly…
He was accepted on Feb 1st in his freshman year while still taking the prerequisites like everyone else. Start of his sophomore year it was official. When in engineering you can use their counselors and resourse centers, was the major difference. I honestly don’t think your gaming the system since if CS students transfer in and out between the two. My son wants to combine both business and engineering and took him that year to understand what industrial engineering offers. So it was like being undecided that year. This was the only school he didn’t apply directly into engineering to. Also technically NO ONE is really in engineering till the end of your Sophomore year when you declare a major. Everything else is just words on a paper regardless what school you go to. That is why many schools have first year engineering etc. You got to make it past that first. It’s harder then it sounds.
@sushiritto I’m glad your fortunute enough to be able to afford to send your student to UMich and pay OOS tuition. No, I wouldn’t know how much OOS tuition or how hard/easy it is to pay that much. What I do know is that I’m paying for college myself and trust me, life would be much less stressful knowing my parents will drop $200,000 for me to go to college.
I don’t think you know how the software engineering/CS industry works. This isn’t something like HR where you answer some behavioral questions to get a job. All top companies make you go through a rigorous tehcnical interview process, usually involving 2-3 rounds of answering tough questions. Please tell me how being CoE provides any benefit over LSA in this case? It comes down to what you know. Plain and simple. And you learn the same things in both schools.
How do you learn the same things in both schools when the coursework is not exactly the same, as I mentioned above there are more math science classes taken in the CoE, AND there are 8 additional units needed to graduate in CoE? That’s not my definition of the same. Same is same. Different is not same.
The degrees are different. One degree has BS-Engineering on it and the other doesn’t.
Can you post 1st year salaries for both degrees or not? Are those statistics available?
In either case, my opinion is that the CS degree earned in the CoE has more prestige all other things being equal. And as an interviewer I’d know the difference. I’d also know that the CoE is more selective. But that’s just me.
The NON CS coursework is not the same. But why does that matter? If you’re hiring someone, why would you care what someone took for classes outside of their major/classes that are not relevant to the job your are hiring the person for?
As for the additional 8 credits, CoE has 128 and LSA has 120. But have you ever asked why? It’s because LSA has so many distribution requirements that the students usually have to take more than 120 credits anyway! And trust me, as a CoE student, I much rather take math/science courses than humanities, foreign languages, and social science courses. It’s personal preference. Rather rude of you to just assume some things are objectively harder than others. I know many engineering students who struggled in their required humanties course and ended up getting Bs.
Obviously they are going to be different. One is in CoE and one is in LSA.
This info is not published, but I know my professors have said the difference is marginal The best I can do is show you Berkeley’s placement for their CS majors in their L&S college and their EECS majors in the their College of Engineering.
Berkeley L&S CS corresponds to UMich LSA CS and Berkeley CoE EECS corresponds to UMich CoE CS. I will add that in terms of selectivity, it would go
Berkeley EECS >>> Berkeley L&S >= UMich CoE > UMich LSA
But my point is to just show that though Berkeley EECS and Berkeley CS are not equally selective, the placement is same.
CS isn’t banking/consulting where you have to go to elite schools to get into the industry. STEM stuff has always been about WHAT you know. Not WHERE you learned it. If you don’t know your stuff, you won’t get the job!
I will just say that there is a large overlap between the two degree’s and leave it at that. The advantage of a COE degree is that if you want to add to or change major’s in engineering it’s much easier to do since there is overlap in engineering fields in general.
Why does it matter? Well, because the CoE student has take more advanced math and science courses. MV Calc and Diff Eq, among the other required science courses in CoE, may be much more preferable to humanities courses.
Ya, well, I’ve not heard that from anyone in LSA, and again, I’m not going to take your word for it. My own kid will graduate early with 120 units.
And just helping my own kid plot her LSA coursework for 5 semesters, using GradeGuide, her LSA Humanities classes have ALWAYS (every single class so far) had a higher average median grade than her STEM classes. It’s is what it is.
Yes they’re different, not the same. Thank you for agreeing.
Actually, UMich CoE publishes their salaries. I couldn’t find LSA CS salaries by major.
First, even in the SF Bay Area, where I live, $5,000 a year is different, not the same, in my book. I love how you dismiss $5,000/year as “marginal.” I wish I was paid $5,000 more a year. Second, Cal is one of the premier CS degrees in the USA. So, we really don’t know how the pay variance between the two degrees compares to outcomes at UMich.
If you haven’t taken MV Calc, Diff Eq, Physics, Chem, etc., at the college level, then you may not get that CS job.
We’ve established that the degrees aren’t the same, the coursework different, the pay outcome, at least at Cal, is different and that, while rude of me, the fact of the matter is that students with STEM degrees have lower GPA’s than those students with degrees in the Humanities. ?
Again, I’m going to move on now. Arguing is against this site’s rules.
Maybe I’m mistaken, I went to a different university.
But aren’t the departments of: math (including MV Calc and Diff Eq), Physics, and Chemistry actually part of the faculty of LSA? Does not LSA have actual majors in these subjects? Aren’t most physical sciences majors at Michigan studying in LSA? Don’t many physical science majors enrolled in LSA routinely take all or most of these cited courses?
I agree with above poster who asserted that, for a lot of engineering students, humanities type courses are actually harder than engineering-type courses. Not necessarily in amount of work, but in ability to excel. A lot of them would rather crank out a series of weekly math-oriented problem sets than write a long term paper. For example. Especially at a good school, when they are competing in those classes with humanities and pre-law types for whom these courses are not a lark.
A number of engineers at my school filled their humanities requirement with the most math-ish courses they could find - mostly economics- and/or the ones with the least work and no term papers. Or few papers period. The more “hardcore” humanities courses/ fields they tended to duck.
Also at my u, the main difference in education between a science major in the LSA-type school and an engineering student was not in taking the lower-level courses cited. They basically all did that. It was the engineers had engineeering distribution requirements (eg a future EE had to take not just EE courses but also courses in other engineering areas like statics & thermo, et al) whereas the "LSA " science major had arts & sciences distribution requirements.
But as to OP, my suggestion would be: seems clear that range of interests are in COE, apply there.
Apply elsewhere too. To the college at each university that you would actually want to attend. If Michigan doesn’t want you someplace else will.
Your essays and application will be stronger supporting a college that most aligns with your actual interests.
I’m not trying to argue with you. I just don’t want you spreading misinformation to prospects that employers care about the difference. If you attended the school, you would really see that employers do not care.
I’m sorry, but do you know what computer science and software engineering (the field most people with CS degrees enter) are? There is absolutely zero physics, chemistry, mv calc, or diff eq needed to do CS/SWE. The most important math is discrete math, which leads into theory of computation. And this math is required by all CS majors. You might also wish to take linear algebra if you want to specialize in something like machine learning, but most students just want to go into software development.
I’m glad you aren’t a hiring manager at a tech company because anyone who would hire someone for taking irrelevant but difficult classes would not keep their job for long. There’s a reason students list RELEVANT coursework on their resumes/LinkedIn. Why? Because those are the courses employers care about.
I’m sorry, but you are picking and choosing what to respond to here. You completely missed the part that Cal’s L&S has twice as many students, so of course its median is going to be lower. If Cal L&S CS has 1000 students and Cal CoE EECS has 500 students, you should really be comparing the top 500 students in L&S to the EECS majors. And really, the difference is going to be a result of SELF-SELECTION. CoE has smarter kids on average, so they might get better jobs because they are smarter, not because of the fact that they are in CoE.
I don’t have skin in this game but I’m curious about outcomes at the CoE career fairs from outside the college. My D is at Purdue (CoE). The biggest career fair, IR, is run by engineering but open to anyone. That said, there are also engineering specific career fairs later in the year and CS in CoS also has their own career fair. There is company overlap but the recruiters are generally looking for different things. There is no pure CS in CoE at Purdue though, it’s ECE.
Second, Cal is one of the premier CS degrees in the USA. So, we really don’t know how the pay variance between the two degrees compares to outcomes at UMich.