Hi I am a high school senior currently deciding between staying in-state and attending Rutgers University – New Brunswick or going out west to UCLA. Both schools are for Computer Science, which at Rutgers is a B.A and a B.S at UCLA.
Although I would love to go to UCLA and I eventually want to work in Southern California, it will cost me ~$170k over four years while Rutgers will cost $15k for 4 years and I can graduate in three years due to AP Credit going towards some math classes and general education classes. This also means that I could most likely complete Rutgers’ 5 year accelerated B.S + M.S in Computer Science in 4 years.
If I did in fact choose UCLA, I wouldn’t have to take out any loans. My parents would cover the cost. However, that is a mighty hefty sum to take on and I don’t want to waste their money if the advantage conferred upon me by attending UCLA isn’t much greater than that given to me at Rutgers.
I either want to work at a startup doing something really innovative or work at an established company such as Google or Microsoft that is innovating in the area of Artificial intelligence.
As a final note, I do expect to attend grad school, as I want to get into Artificial Intelligence and it seems like that is a field that is mainly covered in graduate studies. If I went to UCLA undegraduate, I would have to find money to pay for graduate school as my parents won’t have it.
What is your guys advice?
If your final goal is to work at Google or Microsoft, then Rutgers seems like the better choice, based off of cost, and that SV accepts graduates from basically any university as long as you, the candidate, is a good choice for them.
However, there may be some longer term effects of choosing UCLA over Rutgers. For example, the networking opportunities, especially with respect to computer science and other engineering fields, is much larger.
This is obvious; go to Rutgers if you don’t get into one of the reaches you brought up in earlier threads. There is nothing they teach you at ucla that is $155K better than Rutgers. What you learn and how competitive a candidate you are when you graduate will depend on how hard you work, whether you take part in student activities, whether you get internships. And if you can do a BS/MS in 4 years not only have you saved a lot of your parents money, you just increased your lifetime earnings by that extra year in the workforce ($70K on up) and perhaps a chance to catch a startup
Are you talking about a PhD here? Most schools, certainly any of the ones worth going to, will fund CS majors with a combination of work as a TA/RA and grants. It costs nothing out of your pocket, just 3-7 years of your life…
Your parents could probably put that $155k to better use than by spending it on a UCLA education that might be just barely better Rutgers, though quality of education is not easy to validly and reliably measure. You might have to work a bit harder to land a CS job out of Rutgers, but again, that small deficit is very likely not worth $155k.