Yeah I’m sorry but location is not an advantage between Tufts/Northeastern given how many co-op’s Northeastern has all over the city in the tech world as well as all over the world. As mentioned, getting to Kendall is the same amount of time form both schools, if not less from Northeastern from the 1 bus line.
Again, so many co-op’s are all over the US. Northeastern is one of the top 25 most present degrees in Silicon Valley’s top tech companies new grads, which its location in Boston has nothing to do with.
If you want to look at the research, Northeastern is very well represented at the top CS conferences, much more so that Tufts:
If I’m choosing a place to study CS in Boston today, Northeastern comes in over Tufts but both come in very well above others such as BU and Harvard for me. They are close enough that I would be focusing on fit/cost here primarily though, but if it really came down to purely CS strength, Northeastern all the way for sure. For research above as mentioned, and for the teaching approach detailed below:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Thoughts/Developing_Developers.html
This approach was developed by people at Northeastern and has been adapted by notable CS names such as Waterloo and Brown as well as UChicago, Northwestern, WPI, U of Utah and others.
First, you can always choose to do 4 years and 2 co-op’s. When you consider that doing 3 co-op’s in 5 years means 18 months of around $30 an hour, there’s little to no opportunity cost lost. That extra year means 90K in co-op pay for a CS major, around where average CS salaries will be for both schools.