What evidence do you have? It’s not that I necessarily disbelieve you, it’s just that when someone says this almost every time a specific school comes up without providing any backing information (even anecdotal experience, even if it’s “I visited…”), it starts to sound more like a vendetta. Besides, I don’t think anyone was arguing that the CS education and reputation at Stony Brook, Binghamton, or Buffalo was equivalent to that of Stanford, MIT, or CMU. The statement was simply that they are far more affordable and less selective than those schools. The OP is worried about being able to compete for admission at the tippy-top schools, so alternative suggestions were provided.
Which one are you talking about? The smallest of the current SUNY four-year institutions is the College at Old Westbury, which was founded in 1965 and has an enrollment of 4,315 undergraduates. The student to faculty ratio is 18:1 - quite a bit high for a liberal arts college-style environment, which Old Westbury purports to offer, but not out of line with the average public university (Berkeley’s, UVa’s, UW’s, UCLA’s, Michigan’s). The only SUNY comprehensive colleges with an enrollment of over 10,000 are Buffalo State College (10,661 undergrads; 16:1 ratio) and Empire State College, which is a sort of non-traditional multi-site university aimed at non-traditional, professional, and distance learning students.
If you’re talking about the doctoral universities (excluding the special interest ones like the College of Optometry or Downstate Medical Center), the smallest one is Binghamton, with a undergraduate student body of 13,518 (total just over 16,000) and a student to faculty ratio of 20:1. A little bit higher - certainly not a small liberal arts campus environment - but again, not terribly out of line for a public university. University at Albany’s is 18:1; Stony Brook’s is 16:1 and University at Buffalo’s is 13:1.
I’m assuming you’re talking about Binghamton because the total enrollment and faculty numbers I found are closest to what you posted, and if you take the entire student body (undergrad and grad) and divide only full-time faculty members, you do get something over 25:1. However, that’s not the way anyone calculates student to faculty ratio. For example, Berkeley has 1522 full-time faculty and 38,204 students, making their full-time faculty to student ratio also about 25:1, although their reported ratio is 18:1 because they include part-time instructors as well.
As a side note, I’ll point out that a lot of powerhouse universities - including the entire UC system and the University of Wisconsin system - are plagued by problematic funding. They still have reputations as great universities.