Caltech [$90k+] vs Columbia [$90k+] vs UCSD [full ride] CS/AI

DadTwoGirls
Sun, 06 Apr 2025 16:51:54 +0000

We may be beating a dead horse here, but there are two things that I thought might be worth saying.

The overall “university and employment” system here in the US might be a bit different compared to some other parts of the world. In some other countries the reputation of the university you attend for your bachelor’s degree may be important. In the US there are hundreds of very good universities. You can attend any one of at least 100 different universities and probably more than 200 universities, or any one of at least 100 different liberal arts colleges, and still do very well in life, still attend a prestigious graduate program, and find yourself working alongside graduates from MIT and Harvard and Stanford and Columbia and Caltech. Our university level education system in the US is expensive, but it is also very good and very broad.

We have seen lots of examples where students attend universities ranked lower than any of the Universities of California and then go on to very good careers and to very good graduate programs. If you look at the current students in highly ranked graduate programs you will see that they came from a very wide range of universities and colleges, most of which will be ranked lower than any of Caltech, Columbia, or UCSD. It is not unusual to see a student get their bachelor’s degree at a school ranked anywhere from 50 to 150 and then get a graduate degree from Stanford or MIT or Harvard or Columbia or some other university ranked in the top 5 or 10 in the world for whatever degree the student is getting. I have personally seen quite a few examples of this.

It is also common for the overall ranking for any particular university to be very different from the ranking for any specific major. This might be particularly obvious in my older daughter’s major which is veterinary medicine. The top two DVM programs in North America (both of which are superb) are at universities that are not in the top 30 overall, and one is not even in the top 100 overall, but their DVM programs really are superb. Something similar is true to some extent in many other fields. Because there are so many very good universities in the US, many universities specialize in some specific areas.

And you might at some point run into a top expert in some field or other that attended almost any university that you could think to name.

The other thing that may be worth saying is that Caltech really is a very good university. It is academically very demanding. It is a lot of work. If you want to do it, then you can get a great education there and learn an enormous amount. One thing that you will most likely learn over four years at Caltech: You can do it.

If you can succeed at Catech then you can succeed anywhere. Admissions officers at Caltech know what it takes to succeed there, and they have already given their solid opinion that you can succeed there if you want to do it.