Just joined and happened upon this thread. Regardless of where you end up, my biggest piece of advice would be to find out the historical student to faculty ratio in computer science (or any major, for that matter). One son is a student at UNC where this stat was recently shared: 10 years ago, they had 140 students declared as cs, and 30 cs faculty. This year, they have 1400 students and 33 faculty. Insanity. They claim it is a similar case everywhere, but I wish we had done that specific research before he chose to go there. He will be very lucky if he can graduate in four years because classes are so limited.
Re: #60
Exploding CS enrollment is common at more selective colleges. Different colleges use varying mitigations (not mutually exclusive).
- Limiting admission to the CS major.
- Rationing entry to CS courses.
- Increasing CS class size.
Are there any programs I should avoid to get the best chance at completing a degree in an ideal situation and on time?
Colleges with high 4-year graduation rates in general may offer you advantages along these lines. JHU, for example, could make a good choice by this criterion.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/highest-grad-rate
Programmer here - It’s pretty simple. Go where your parents can afford to send you without them co-signing private loans over to you. The only profession where salary can justify the high debt amount would be medicine…and even that’s pushing it. Not even even lawyers make enough to justify the average student loan amount.
Technology is a comfortable fruitful profession, but it doesn’t justify large debt. By the time you make enough to drive a Mercedes to work, your student loans will be paid off. Salary in the tech industry is based entirely on work experience, so you should expect to make a relatively modest salary for the first several years. That’s why you don’t want high debt, because you’ll have a very difficult time paying it off at a modest salary.
No, there’s no special tech salary for people who go to elite schools. That’s a big myth and I chuckle every time I hear it. They love to boast “high starting salaries.” Well, most are on the east/west coast, with a higher cost of living. Plus, all that overachiever fluff wears off in a couple years anyway. I’ve worked for a number of different companies, including fortune 500s, and none of them asked where I went to school. Believe me, employers could care less, because the job has probably been open for 6 months.
“shotgun T10 schools for CS”
do you mean top-10 regardless of location and affordability, so a place like Stanford and Berkeley would make it or after your consider places you can afford and closer to home, in which case the list would different?
closer to home would be CMU, MIT, Cornell, UMD, UMass-Amherst, RPI, Penn, Rutgers
further away, you’re looking at a lot of state flagships, UM, Illinois, Ga Tech, UCB, UT-Austin, UWash, along with Stanford, Cal Tech, USC. There are lot of good schools outside the top-10 of course, but if you parents need to see a college in a top-10 list to help out with college financially (which I don’t agree with but understand), then your choices are more limited.
- Avoid colleges which are too expensive and may force you to drop out due to running out of money, or require large amounts of work (>10 hours per week) during the school year that can reduce time for school work.
- If there is a high college GPA or competitive admission for enrolled students to enter or stay in the major, be careful. A 3.5 GPA is typically more difficult in college than in high school.
- CS department should offer a reasonable range of upper level CS courses frequently enough, with enough space for CS majors to take them.
Graduation rates are mostly a proxy of admission selectivity and students’ parental financial capability and generosity.
They just went under the US News list of CS programs and looked at the top 10 (the only schools they can name off the top of their heads are Penn State and Harvard).
They don’t understand that stats alone won’t guarantee admission. The final list is up to me, so I want to pick more realistic and somewhat affordable options, but they insist on insanely selective name-brand schools like Harvard and MIT. That said, I believe they would support me at any school given that I can prove it’s the right choice academically and financially, so it’s just a matter of finding the right balance.
Note that U.S. News does not rank undergraduate computer science programs. If you’ve accessed graduate department rankings, then they may divert you from colleges with attributes that might be desirable for an undergraduate student.
Apart from student-to-faculty ratio and specialization in certain areas, what makes one program better than another? What makes one degree worth more money than another? Is it something you can quantify?
Sources such as Kiplinger’s attempt to analyze general value. In this ranking, schools such as Princeton and MIT place highly:
https://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-best-college-values-college-finder/index.php#Tile
Re #71, this link might be more accessible:
There’s actually another thread on quantifying college outcomes.
There’s a lot of discussion on engineering and CS there.
Hamilton does not take into account the value of your primary residence. Many schools do. That’s a big variable for your family. I do not think Hamilton’s 40k is correct, and they do state that if you own your own business that online calculators are not accurate. In general they are rather generous with aid.
They may at least equally reflect, as stated by U.S. News, how good a school “is at offering the classes and services that students need to succeed.”