Droids kid may apply. I’d love to hear any/all experiences from those concentrating in CS, Engineering, Math, and/or Physics. Any sub-concentrations within these. Thoughts/impressions? Anything you’d do differently if you had it to do over again? Impact of not being ABET certified?
A kid from our school did General Engineering (they have such a thing — unspecified major) at Brown and had a really tough time getting a job. Eventually just going to law school now. The three kids that I know that did CS placed very well. This was 2 years ago, one year ago, and this year.
2 Likes
Brown is ABET accredited in multiple engineering fields.
CS is a different story. Many very good CS programs are not ABET accredited. It’s not that important. I wouldn’t worry at all about that at Brown. They have a good reputation in CS.
Where this really matters is for new, unknown engineering programs that were unable to get accredited. That’s not Brown.
2 Likes
Sorry I was partially mistaken. This page contains a little more detail but it would appear that some concentrations are, others are not:
https://bulletin.brown.edu/the-college/concentrations/engn/
Just want to make sure I understand what you’re saying here. Are you saying that “it’s ok that Brown is not ABET certified bc it’s a long standing program which is well known and well regarded?”
General is not ABET and many companies require. Only their sub categories are. Plus few seek general engineering in job postings. So the general major probably suffers a double whammy.
That may be why.
I can’t imagine ABET and defined at paths majors at Brown or most anywhere having issues in the current environment.
I’m saying that for CS it’s OK. I would not choose a non-ABET accredited engineering program at any school, save for MIT, Caltech or Stanford if a student wants to be a practicing engineer. It’s an unnecessary risk. If they want to work in finance, it’s not really an issue.
4 Likes
Many thanks to both of you @tsbna44 and @eyemgh
Would love and appreciate hearing from others as well!
1 Like
My husband is a career electrical engineer and was VP of his company…and did a LOT of hiring over a long period of time. He wouldn’t even interview someone who hadn’t graduated from an ABET accredited program for his field. The company did a lot of work for government agencies, and expected that everyone hired would get their PE at some point (required for certain engineering disciplines for certain types of work). This is far easier when you have gone to an accredited school.
If the student has a choice between an accredited program and one that isn’t, my husband suggests the accredited program. (Again…depending on the specific engineering discipline).
3 Likes
A bit different than in school experience but here’s career data. It seems old but was updated in Nov 22. I don’t see recent data.
Seems STEM may be smaller. But you can certainly contact and ask for outcomes. Also a student ambassador for your student to speak with.
I know of a math undergrad now in a PhD program at a large and respected public.
Hope more come on for you. There’s several tabs. Good luck.
You asked for first hand experience so here you go…
My kid was an applied math concentrator and started his venture while at Brown. He found the flexibility of the open curriculum, the resources of the Nelson center, the various in house funding vehicles and the extensive alumni network invaluable.
By the time he graduated he had secured angel funding well into the multiple 7 figures, secured industry leading advisors, and had anchor investors that are household names.
As a result of the support received his venture was fast tracked through a leading accelerator, several of the graduate schools provided introductions that led to changes in state legislation and media attention.
The venture is now a fully operational company in several states and has secured significant incremental financing for scaling.
His experience is unique in many ways but his peers have all seemingly landed well. His friends are at a variety of IB, consulting, med school, PE and other start ups. While I am sure there are occasional outliers as @neela1 (even at schools like Princeton) points out, the CS kids from brown seem to do pretty well.
This is a ranking from FreeOpp that looks at ROI amongst CS majors.
- CMU $4,125,963
- Rice $3,781,869
- Brown $3,535,080
- Stanford $3,305,484
- Yale $3,296,380
- Harvard $3,268,145
- Caltech $3,102,888
- Cornell $2,966,699
- Cal Poly $2,920,317
- MIT $2,909,266
- UCLA $2,853,535
- UC Berkeley $2,843,321
- Duke $2,546,552
- Johns Hopkins $2,515,869
- Vanderbilt $2,461,053
- UIUC $2,417,724
- U Michigan $2,258,080
- Columbia $2,130,692
- GeorgiaTech $1,966,139
- UW Seattle $1,943,759
We Calculated Return On Investment For 30,000 Bachelor’s Degrees. Find Yours.
2 Likes
Just a word of caution. Brown’s CS programs has been pretty small until relatively recently, so their sample size is pretty small, especially since almost all of the data is from 2016 and 1999. For example, in 2010, there were fewer than 50 students who graduated with a degree in CS from Brown.
Likely the same would be true for Vanderbilt as well, since they had even fewer CS students until 2016 or so.
Harvard and Yale also had pretty small numbers of computer science graduates until recently. For example, in 2010, only 40 students got a bachelors degree at Harvard in CS.
So I would say that the data from these four colleges is not reliable and is possibly not representative of graduates from CS in these colleges. The data will only be reliable in another 15 years or so.
The problem, among other issues, is that their ROI is based on averages. Especially when the sample size is small, a small number of high earning individuals can skew the data, and the average will not actually represent the experience of the majority of the graduates from that program.
I will also state that Caltech suffers from the opposite issue. About half of the graduates go on to do a PhD, so an average ROI of $3,102,888 is based on the half that does not do their PhD, since graduate students live off of stipends of around $35K-$40K a year. I would actually say that the ROI of Caltech students who do not choose to do a PhD is much higher, while students who want to do PhDs do not really care about ROI.
So, from that data, CMU is likely reliable, Rice, Stanford, Cornell, Cal Poly, MIT, UCs, Duke, JHU, UIUC, Michigan, GTech and U-Dub. The data may be skewed, but the medians and averages are likely close enough that these data represent a common outcome.
3 Likes
Thank you all! @thumper1 @Catcherinthetoast and @MWolf
Would love to hear more if anyone else is out there.
I will add though, that for STEM fields that are generally part of “Liberal Arts and Sciences” (i.e. most physical and life sciences) the data from Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Vanderbilt is more reliable, since these colleges have had those majors for a few centuries. I would definitely trust the ROI data for these colleges for humanities and for almost all social sciences majors.
1 Like
Do you have specifics as to what you are trying to find out?
Here is a link to Brown’s CS department handbook:
Brown CS: CS Concentration Handbook
And here is a link to more detailed information about their pathways:
Brown CS: Pathways For Undergrad And Master’s Students
And here is a link to current courses (you can choose to view courses by semester and the department. The CS department code is CSCI).
1 Like
Many thanks!
As for specifics, the answer really is “none” beyond general experiences. All the info here has been helpful.
Would love to hear from anyone with experience in math and physics too.
While that makes sense logically, my once removed anecdata from my Brown math kid is that CS places very well in the markets for which the kids compete fiercely, and that that is true today. So, my understanding is that Boston, Seattle and SF/Palo-Alto are places where Brunonians place very well and that they have something of a rep of being loyal to alma mater, which isn’t necessarily true of all schools. Do those market salaries skew the data a bit? Sure, but it’s that very skewed data to which many (not all of course) kids aim to contribute themselves. If, on the other hand, you want to be in the midwest or the south, then maybe some due diligence about where and how Brown achieves that ROI is in order. No argument there. There was a huge scrap on this topic a year or two ago, where the list posted by @Catcherinthetoast, and Brown’s place on it, was a featured point of discussion.
As for my kid’s experience in STEM, I’m not sure what to add. She is, like her siblings, very good at math and decided to be a concentrator in that subject. She’s doing well, but her courses are not easy and she has to work to consistently receive good grades. Not sure what she wants to do. She doesn’t spend a lot of time in CS, but she can write some code and knows a lot of the usual line up of key STEM applications - R, Python, etc. Seems you need those if you’re a STEM major in almost anything just to do your homework. She also takes full advantage of the flexibility in curriculum at Brown and, to borrow from a great poster in this forum, she’s being “beautifully educated.” I’m sure we will have received our money’s worth. It’s a lovely place to spend 4 years, and it offers a lot of options academically and extra-curricularly. Like any school, I’m sure there are things offered in less supply at Brown than somewhere else, but on balance it’s been 100% approval with literally zero complaints. She (and we) especially like Providence and its proximity to many great places.
3 Likes
This is no comment on Brown, pro or con, but those are the geographic areas where MANY of CS grads from MANY schools go.
Fair enough. Then the argument of skewed statistics on any measure of ROI, which would necessarily include post-grad compensation, is further weakened if what you say is true, which I suspect it is.