Who has some input? As many CS majors know, there aren’t very many undergraduate CS college rankings (reliable ones, anyways).
What is the rankings from CC?
On the list I would probably put
Stanford
UC Berkeley
MIT
UT Austin
Georgia Tech
I’m not sure which other ones would fill in the list. Any ideas?
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh- it has something like a 6% acceptance rate for CS. The hardest program however is in CFA. Their College of Fine Arts drama program has something like a 3% acceptance rate.
@goingnutsmom ooh good one! Can’t believe will forgot that one
Caltech
Illinois (UIUC)
So is there any difference between graduate and undergraduate rankings? If we’re just going to recite the graduate rankings, what’s the point?
I’m not necessarily disagreeing. However, there are very different criteria for what makes a top CS college, depending on your plans. The bigger problem is that a lot of the criteria is subjective or intangible. For example, how does one decide the best method for teaching an introductory CS class and ‘rank’ apples to oranges?
If you’re looking to go into development, research ranks can often be less useful. Conversely, for someone looking to stay in academia and research, job placement ranks would be pretty meaningless.
In the end, the same top schools are going to be up there and practically indistinguishable in quality - the much more interesting part of undergraduate CS ranks come with the schools in the next tier, and of course vary by criteria.
Another thing to consider if you have a specific area of interest. There are professors who are great at teaching and professors who are terrible at teaching, at every college, including the super elite schools.
If you have a specific area of interest, I would look at every college on your list and try to figure out if the guy or gal who teaches the courses in that area, and does the research in that area, can actually teach, and can be a good mentor in research.
Some teachers are great and some mail it in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It would be a real bummer to get into your reach CS school and realize that the teacher who specializes in your area of interest is a total dud. They exist at every school.
At my school, there was one really amazing guy. He happened to teach in an area that was not my area of interest. He was so good that he almost converted me. In the end, there was an almost as amazing guy who hooked me into his area, but aside from those two, I would have been lost.
Just something to consider.
http://www.collegechoice.net/rankings/best-computer-science-degree/
slight variance from graduate rankings
Those rankings seem very peculiar to me - UF over UW-Madison? So many public schools? Few tech schools listed, who are both undergraduate and tech focused? UMass Amherst coming in at 49?
So, a derivative of US News with Payscale data and a nebulous “program websites”. That makes sense. To be fair, I’m not familiar with NCE statistics, but still. This does not consider any interesting factors really.
The following website tracks faculty placement. You might have to change the hiring network to computer science in the upper left hand corner.
http://danlarremore.com/faculty/
The top 10 for CS faculty placement is:
1 - Stanford
2 - Berkeley
3 - MIT
4 - CalTech
5 - Harvard
6 - Cornell
7 - Carnegie Mellon
8 - Princeton
9 - Yale
10 - University of Washington
On the other hand, a friend works at a technology related law firm in downtown San Francisco, and he tells me that if you don’t have someone with a degree from Stanford, Berkeley or Harvard on your team, it is much more difficult to get money for a startup.
@Zinhead What exactly does faulty placement have to do with ranking? I’m not familiar with that statistic
You can read the whole paper behind the graphs here:
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005.full
Essentially, faculty placement is useful proxy for the strength of the faculty, and it is about as relevant as any other ordering system.
@Jpgranier It’s another reflection of PhD quality prestige, or another graduate CS ranking metric.
@Zinhead @PengsPhils Thank y’all!
When it says Washington, is that WashU or UWa?
It is the University of Washington which is a major feeder to Microsoft.
Someone posted this resource the other day:
@goingnutsmom UCLA has about a 4% acceptance rate for transfers who pick CS, so if you’re going that by metric UCLA would be up there too (and should be). That said although there’s a correlation, but I don’t think acceptance rate is an inherent factor when it comes to discussing schools with good programs. Some schools just get more applicants making it inherently unscientific.
@Zinhead I’m looking over that faculty placement graph, and I don’t understand it. Do the connecting lines mean a faculty member left the school you’re hovering over or went to the school you’re hovering over? I can’t see a difference in colors.
The website represents PHD production. If you put your cursor over the lines connecting the various colleges, you will see a floating window with the number of newly minted going back and forth between two schools.
For example, if you look at the line connecting Standford and Berkeley, you will see that nine Stanford CS PHDs went to Berkley, while eight Berkeley PHDs went to Stanford.
If you hover your cursor over the name of the school, it provides the total intake and placement of CS PHDs. For example, Stanford hired 47 CS PHD’s during the time period, while the school graduated 189 CS PHDs.
@AgentXJP, I don’t get why you are citing stats for transfers into CS. Is the topic about transfers for CS? I’m confused. What is the acceptance rate for CS at UCLA for freshman applying into the program? Transfer rates are certainly almost always much more difficult. But transfer rates are irrelevant to this topic.
Schools with low acceptance rates into their CS programs have a low acceptance rate because they are some of the BEST CS programs. To say anything different is ridiculous. You don’t get low acceptance rates when you have a shoddy CS department or CS program.
CMU absolutely has one of the best CS programs around. Ask anyone in the CS field.
BTW, my husband has a PhD in CS and he believes that you can get a solid CS education at a number of schools. You don’t need a CS degree from the top programs to find a good job coming out as an undergrad. And then as you gain experience no one really cares. Your professional performance and experience is what really counts.
@goingnutsmom That’s flawed logic. By that logic UCLA’s CS department would be in the top 10 and it’s not. Certainty it’s a top school, but you can’t directly correlate acceptance rates with program quality in any reliable or scientific way.
For example geographical factors or university rules could arbitrarily result in some school getting 10~20k more applicants than another school with a superior program and harder criteria, but less applicants. These schools could then have similar acceptance rates despite a notable difference in program quality.