http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/math-computer-science-majors/1814245-computer-science-at-some-smaller-schools-including-liberal-arts-colleges-p1.html is an older thread listing CS offerings at the time at various smaller colleges. Due to the age of the thread, it is best to check catalogs and schedules yourself. But you can check the thread for the list of typical upper level CS courses to look for.
Maybe because the cost of college is very high these days and students who are from middle class families don’t get enough aid to attend. There was that kid that got into all of the ivies but decided to go to U of Alabama at Huntsville since it was the cheapest option for his family
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This is an old thread, but Yes (and the issue is still relevant). This is exactly why we are seeing more and more of the strongest graduates in CS coming from in-state public universities. A very high percentage of the students who want to major in computer science come from families that fall solidly in the “donut hole” range where they make too much to get financial aid but not enough to be comfortable spending $300,000 for a bachelor’s degree.
There is also a domino effect. When the hiring manager is a public university graduate, a third of the group are public university graduates, and the rest of the group have graduated from a university in India, the tendency is to look for more graduates from the same schools. The fact that we also have a few old guys who are MIT or Stanford graduates might have once mattered, but really doesn’t anymore.
There is also a second domino effect. When your child wants to major in CS, and 90% of the people you work with graduated from public universities (whether in the US or India or elsewhere), the tendency is to consider relatively affordable public universities even for those few who could afford full pay at a private university.
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Maybe grad based, but not choosing to apply to the top colleges on that list because they’re ranked high is a little odd reasoning. It’s a good starting list, what do you see wrong with it, MIT at #3!
“Years ago I worked at IBM in the Hudson Valley, and Marist and IBM had a close partnership.”
I spent a few years in Poughkeepsie as well and agree with you on Marist and Union, but IBM is a shell of what it was in the Hudson Valley, between the three plants, they probably had 40K peak, now it’s probably a few thousand.
The question is which rankings though. The top 25 US News National University rankings are:
- Princeton
- Harvard
- Columbia
- MIT
Yale - Stanford
UChicago - UPenn
- Caltech
Johns Hopkins
Northwestern - Duke
- Dartmouth
- Brown
- Vanderbilt
- Rice
Washington U, St Louis - Cornell
- Notre Dame
- UCLA
- Emory
- Berkeley
- Georgetown
- Michigan
USC - Carnegie Mellon
Virginia
The same (US News) rankings for undergrad CS are:
- MIT
- Carnegie Mellon
Stanford
Berkeley - Caltech
Cornell
Georgia Tech
Princeton
Illinois
U Washington Seattle - Texas
- Michigan
- Columbia
Harvard
UCLA - UC San Diego
Maryland
UPenn
Wisconsin - Harvey Mudd
Johns Hopkins
Purdue
Rice
Yale - Brown
Duke
Northwestern
UC Irvine
UChicago
USC
See any pattern above? Some top reputed private universities retain their spots in the CS rankings, some are respectable and several underperform and very few over-perform. Correspondingly the flagship state universities by and large over-perform. So one or both the rankings are bogus. Or DadTwoGirls & notanikdey’s points are probably coming into play - that for CS, people do not care about whether you are from super elite school or a reasonably competitive state school - and the financial equations make it so that the best students may or may not go to the elite schools. This is fairly different from other countries (e.g. where I came from - India) where the top colleges are also the cheapest colleges and the decision which college to go is straight-forward.
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