Hi,
I’ve been accepted to both NC State and UNC but can’t decide between their respective C.S. programs. UNC is obviously more prestigious, but I’ve heard their CS department is lackluster. Is there any truth to that claim?
No. UNC CS is a top 25 CS program, tied with Duke, Brown, and JHU in the US News CS ranking and is higher than NCSU. Whoever told you that UNC is weaker than NCSU in CS is misinformed.
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While I wouldn’t strongly argue your claim in this case, I wouldn’t use US News nor that selection of schools to prove your point.
The methodology for US News makes it near useless for anything outside the top 10.
RANKINGS OF DOCTORAL programs in the sciences published in 2018 were based solely on the results of surveys sent to academics in biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, earth sciences, mathematics, physics and statistics.
Response rates for the doctoral science programs were as follows: … computer science, 35%
In other words, a set of random CS academics who may or may not have meaningful knowledge of other colleges responded less than half the time, and that’s all that ranking is. Hence why the rankings tend to reflect more general name recognition.
If you compare research output (un-size adjusted), UNC actually comes in 46 and NCSU 52. This ranking is not perfect and is not inherently reflective of academic experience, but it’s only to say when it comes to CS the two are actually quite comparable.
To the specific case, I could see picking NCSU over UNC, though I don’t think either is a bad choice. Neither are CS powerhouses, but both will provide you a solid CS education.
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