Whats The Difference Between A CompSci Degree In A Liberal Arts College Vs Tech University?

That may be true if we’re looking for single indicator of program quality. We don’t know (from the data cited above) how many CS majors even choose to begin a CS PhD program (let alone what their alternatives are.)
But if some folks here are claiming that CS programs at LACs in general (or the top programs in particular) lack rigor, or don’t provide enough breadth/depth to prepare graduates for success, then the PhD numbers do seem to provide evidence to the contrary. Whether getting a PhD in CS is desirable or not, no doubt it’s a hard thing to accomplish.

It’s not practical to hunt and peck your way through 1000 colleges in building an application list.
The original post triggers questions about whether LACs in general are even worth investigating for this particular major. One might claim that CS is basically an engineering major that demands nearly full attention from year 1, so it doesn’t allow enough room for the general ed expectations of a typical LAC. Or, one might claim that the LAC form factor simply doesn’t provide enough critical mass of professors and courses to satisfy the needs of this major.

As for specific choices, if you think you want to dive deep into AI and can get into Stanford, hey, go for it. However, most CC students/families need alternatives to Stanford (or to Amherst for that matter). The OP asked about Union or Bucknell v. NYU or BU (not Amherst v. Stanford).

Suppose (for whatever reason) you’ve ruled out your own state flagship, you want more aid than you think you’ll get at most other state flagships, but (for whatever reason) you aren’t too attracted to schools that offer big automatic merit scholarships. One reasonable place to start looking is at the 40-60 schools that claim to cover 100% of demonstrated need (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2016-09-19/colleges-that-claim-to-meet-full-financial-need). Take away a few impossibly selective universities (including Stanford). Many remaining schools are LACs. Is it the case that none of them are worth comparing, for a prospective CS major, to universities like Boston College, Georgetown, Tufts, or USC?

New Jersey problems?

People only comparing courses or Phd placement are missing the point on Stanford vs Amherst (or MIT vs. Williams), at these schools not only do you have the depth and breadth but you get a lot more symposiums and seminars on CS topics like AI, machine learning, data science and you get better cross discipline perspective. These are usually a couple hours or maybe a day and you don’t see them in any course catalog.

Second, the link of CS to electrical/computer engineering is significant, you need some understanding of how software uses or runs on hardware, that is why CS is in the engineering dept at many of these universities. It should be self evident that no LAC can compete with Stanford, MIT, CMU, Berkley ,Cal Tech, Michigan in EE or CSE.

For the Phd argument, many undergrads of the top CS schools typically start companies, here’s a infographic that shows the top schools that produce successful startups:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241844

@thelonliusmonk
You should have explained all that to Steve Jobs (Reed x73?), Bill Gates, Steve Case (Williams '80), or Mark Zuckerberg before they went off and started companies without first being schooled in that link.

But to rephrase what I for one already have stated, if you want an engineering degree not a liberal arts degree, then yes by all means choose a technical institute or an engineering school within a comprehensive RU.

^^I keep hearing the same bootstrap argument: “This is how you approach a CS degree because this is how a research university approaches a CS degree.” The bottom line is, no one has demonstrated that there are any bad decisions here, so long as you are dealing with a Forbes Top 50 institution:
https://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/#6c50c01b1987

That makes no sense. You don’t have to be at a school with an electrical engineering or computer engineering major to learn how software and hardware interact.

@thelonliusmonk
You should have explained all that to Steve Jobs (Reed x73?), Bill Gates, Steve Case (Williams '80), or Mark Zuckerberg before they went off and started companies without first being schooled in that link.”

I’m not sure what your point is, they all dropped out, except for Case. And those are exceptions, for every Gates, there are 10 others who did graduate - Google (UM, Maryland), Apple (Berkeley), Cisco (Penn, CSU-Chico), Amazon (Princeton), Sun (Harvard, CMU, IIT, Michigan).

@theloniusmonk

Exactly right. Several of them didn’t even complete their liberal arts degree programs, yet went on to establish/lead great technology companies. So an engineering degree (or even a very deep understanding of the hardware-software link you cited) isn’t essential for impressive IT career outcomes. Not that we’d want to encourage students to drop out or discourage them from developing that important knowledge. Jeff Bezos is a good counter-example (graduated from Princeton, EE + CS), but I bet you could find Princeton grads succeeding in IT after CS programs that aren’t very different from what you could get at Swarthmore, Pomona, Wesleyan, Carleton, and other schools without EE.

@circuitrider

Yes, and there are attractive schools (both universities and LACs) beyond the Forbes Top 50 as well.

Macalester (a LAC, #100) claims to cover 100% of demonstrated financial need, is in an attractive urban location (if you can handle the Minnesota winters), has an endowment per student bigger than Brown’s/Columbia’s/Cornell’s/JHU’s, and isn’t impossibly selective. Recent graduates are at Google, Amazon, UChicago and GaTech (PhD programs), and the Mayo Clinic. Alumni include Jeremy Allaire (creator of the web dev tool ColdFusion, CEO of Circle) and the co-developers of social media marketing tool Wildfire (sold to Google for $450 million).

So, after all the discussion how would the schools in the OPs question be ranked? As a reminder, the schools are Union, Bucknell, NYU, and Boston University?

People here can entertain themselves with the CS course listings of these four schools here:

https://catalog.union.edu/content.php?filter%5B27%5D=CSC&filter%5B29%5D=&filter%5Bcourse_type%5D=-1&filter%5Bkeyword%5D=&filter%5B32%5D=1&filter%5Bcpage%5D=1&cur_cat_oid=14&expand=&navoid=499&search_database=Filter&filter%5Bexact_match%5D=1#acalog_template_course_filter
https://www.bucknell.edu/academics/engineering-college-of/academic-departments/computer-science/course-descriptions.html
https://www.bu.edu/academics/cas/courses/computer-science/
https://cs.nyu.edu/dynamic/courses/catalog/

“Exactly right. Several of them didn’t even complete their liberal arts degree programs, yet went on to establish/lead great technology companies.”

Well Harvard is not a LAC, so you can’t shift the discussion by including ivies, if you include them, then you’re bringing a lot more gravitas to the liberal arts education for CS argument.

“Princeton grads succeeding in IT after CS programs that aren’t very different from what you could get at Swarthmore, Pomona, Wesleyan, Carleton, and other schools without EE”

I disagree on this, you have to look at the experience not just courses available, the guest speakers, ability to work on cutting edge research, guest lectures every week, maybe every day, a culture of technology permeating the dept or major and it’s not close. This would be like me saying hey, English at my local state school is just as good as Amherst because they both have courses on literature, writing, history. No the experience and vibe you you get at Amherst being a lit or english major is substantially superior than any state school (well not named Michigan or Berkeley - ok just kidding).

How much you learn when it comes to CS is going to primarily depend on how much you study and how many hours you spend in front of a computer. You don’t suddenly get a bunch of CS information implanted into you just because you walk onto a particular campus.

“How much you learn when it comes to CS is going to primarily depend on how much you study and how many hours you spend in front of a computer.”

No, that’s not the way CS is learned, it’s being exposed to cutting edge research, working with professors who are preeminent field, making connections. Did you graduate with a CS degree?

What you describe does not describe the vast majority of people who graduate with a BA/BS in CS and who go on to do useful technical work in computing after graduation.

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“What you describe does not describe the vast majority of people who graduate with a BA/BS in CS and who go on to do useful technical work in computing after graduation.”

Exactly, you only get the atypical experience at the elite CS colleges. Take big data which was helped in its development by someone who came up a with a new way to store data at Google, who went to undergrad at Stanford. Most schools including LACs won’t get that type of student or figure out how to nurture that innate talent.

Are you saying a LAC is better than Stanford at CS, that’s an interesting position, which LAC and why?

You wrote in reply #93 that the way CS is learned is “being exposed to cutting edge research, working with professors who are preeminent field, making connections”, rather than claiming that was a special or atypical experience. Indeed, that may be more what a PhD student experiences (or wants to experience).

I made no such claim.

Stanford is irrelevant to most students, since most students are not getting admitted to Stanford (the same goes for other elite-admissions schools that are out-of-reach for the vast majority and a low chance of admission even for those with top-end academic credentials). Most college students attend non-elite (either in CS or overall) colleges, but many such colleges offer solid education in CS so that CS majors at such colleges who do well can be successful in industry or graduate study in CS. Yes, it is important to avoid those with really limited CS departments, but those where one can get a solid education in CS are more widely available than many here seem to think.

^ Agree. The demand for computing skills is far more than Stanford and a few other top-tier universities can supply.

I can drive a few miles to a sleepy little no-name regional university and enroll in evening classes in one of the core subjects specified by the ACM model CS curriculum guides. If someone did well in the full program there, with one or two interesting internships, s/he should have a decent shot at landing a job with a salary in the mid 5 figures (maybe a bit more.) In the Washington-Baltimore area for example there are many such opportunities that do not require a Stanford degree.

A little farther away at Johns Hopkins University, yes, a student would have even better opportunities. Until a few years ago, if one met the prerequisites, maybe a JHU undergrad could have gotten into a course with a guy who helped invent the field of statistical NLP for speech processing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jelinek). You might even be able to elbow past the favored grad students onto a well-funded research project in a field like that, possibly even get your name as one of many student co-authors on a paper, then parlay that experience into a job at Apple or acceptance into a tip-top PhD program.

Or, one could enroll in the kind of LAC where you’d get full attention from professors who studied under top people at places like JHU, and still have very good (if not paradigm-shifting) research opportunities. You wouldn’t have to elbow your way past grad students. Then if you did well, you’d still have a good shot at job opportunities with good companies (not necessarily Google) or admission to decent grad schools.

https://www.macalester.edu/academics/mscs/aftermac/
http://www.wesleyan.edu/mathcs/cs/jobs_etc.html
https://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/cs/summerresearch/2017/
https://www.pomona.edu/academics/departments/computer-science/research
https://www.bucknell.edu/news-and-media/current-news/2015/april/student-startup-madness.html

Or, just apply to your own state flagship or directional u. I’d expect almost any of them to have a program to address demand for computing skills in the local/regional economy.

@theloniusmonk

My bachelors is CS and my masters is IE. And I have over 30 years doing software development in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Seattle, and New York.

Your impression of how CS is learned is nowhere close to being accurate. CS is a field where you learn by doing. Mind if I ask what your CS experience is? I’ve been going through your past comments and see no indication you have any programming background.

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@simba9

I agree if you take the same kind of coursework (with similar content, not like the AI-lite course that a previous poster brought up) at an LAC or a RU - you will be prepared either way.

However, the requirements at many LACs for CS degrees lead to many students, if not most, not getting the same level of CS exposure.