@lovemycats Good luck in your son’s decision. CS is the most highly impacted major, especially at state schools. Unfortunately, SBU has to have weed out courses since it can’t admit all those highly qualified students wanting to major in CS. It’s just reality. If Bing has more friendly, approachable CS dept, kudos to them. SBU is the only SUNY my son applied to. We are still deciding between SBU and a USNews top 10-ranked private school (about $5,000/yr difference). Latter offers flexibility in engineering curriculum, in addition to pursuing another major/minor in non STEM field. My son was admitted as a CS major but wants to take more advanced science and fundamental engineering courses. He’s now thinking it maybe better to be a mech engineering major with a minor in CS. We are still uncertain if this is possible at SBU and still graduate in 4 years.
As a former PhD student in engineering 25 years ago, everyone in my class was fully supported (including living expenses) by the dept. Has this changed over the years?