Not lookin at colleges I’m just wondering what y’all think.
What is your home state (or home country if not USA)?
What is your budget?
What are your stats? Unweighted GPA would be best because the way that weighted GPA is calculated varies too much between high schools.
I have been working with software engineers for a long time. 30 or 20 years ago perhaps half of the strongest graduates that I was seeing were coming from MIT and Stanford. Today the strongest graduates that I am seeing are coming from public universities. One reason is that the cost of private schools has become prohibitive, especially for students with professional parents who are making in total around $200,000 per year, which seems to be common among the strongest students who want to go into computer science. The other reason is that I am seeing a lot of very, very strong students who do not have the “hooks” to get into famous private schools but who do have the straight A’s, and 1450+ SAT scores to get into their in-state public universities. The result is that we mostly hire from public schools now.
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In very broad strokes, there’s been a “big four” at the top for many, many years - MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley.
That’s how it was when I was an undergrad and with the rankings I’ve pulled together as my D is looking at CS schools, they still came out on top, averaging 7 different sources of ratings.
“top rated” or “viewed at best” doesn’t mean any are right for a specific student. There are many very good schools, any of which may be “best” in a given situation.
There are CS majors and also a broad range interdisciplinary applications of the basic CS skill sets… Robotic applications and AI are found at the above mentioned universities. The scope of these offerings is also very rich at universities like Georgia Tech, VPI, Stevens, State University of NY at Stony Brook, RPI, U Mass, U of Washington, WPI et al.
I’d add Purdue, UIUC, and Michigan to the above list.
Add UCLA, U of Washington, and Cornell.