What are some prestigious computer science programs in the US?
The Big 4 is Cal, Stanford, CMU and MIT. But there are a lot of good ones.
Top 4 (everyone agrees): Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, MIT
Tier one (people generally agree): UIUC, Washington (Seattle), Georgia Tech, Michigan, UCLA, Wisconsin (Madison), and several Ivies (Cornell, Princeton, Columbia)
Tier two (people argue about inclusion in this tier): UCSD, Maryland, Purdue, UMass, Rice, USC, and the rest of Ivies except Dartmouth (Harvard, Yale, Penn, Brown)
After that, many public universities and privates have good programs, but if you are looking for prestigious ones, pick some from the above list.
Please note that the prestigious CS programs do not always coincide with the prestigious colleges. For examples, many state public flagships have strong CS programs but ranks lower in the USNEWS college rankings. The Ivies have high ranking in college rankings but may not have the best CS programs.
What is your goal? Get a job? Go on to grad school?
Small college or big college? Cal Tech and Harvey Mudd aren’t big programs, but they are on par with those listed above.
I’ll go to graduate school and get a job. And I’d prefer a big college.
I don’t think you can go wrong with any of the ones listed above, if you can get in. Do read the fine print though, as many of those schools have further GPA requirements once you are in the school in order to actually become a CS major.
Princeton’s CS degree is more theoretical in nature than the other top CS schools and a great primer for grad school but you can probably find a slightly different major at the other schools like Stanford’s Mathematical and Computational Sciences major that might be a better choice for moving on to grad school.
With CS, prestige is overrated and unnecessary. Virtually all of your real education will end up being on the job, and that’s what’s actually going to get you ahead in your career. The school gets you an entry level job and nothing more. In fact, in my current job, my boss never even asked about my education. I have one, but the question never came up. It’s best to stay in-state and go with something less expensive. The more scholarship money, the better. Being debt free means you can focus your energy on your new job without financial problems distracting you.
That’s not really true. Although it is true that how you move up has nothing to do with school, the fact of the matter is is that for companies like Facebook and Google, etc, they are looking at the cream of the crop for graduates every year. The differentiator is what school you go to. It’s the difference between starting say at 100K per year versus $60K a year.
If you’re going to make the argument about college cost savings, everyone should be staying in-state to go to public schools, and private schools shouldn’t even exist.
For highest starting pay it is Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, Dartmouth.
Take it from a computer professional. A 90k starting salary in Silicon Valley is barely paycheck to paycheck. If you deflate the cost of living and high taxes, it equates to barely $45k-55k a year. It’s just another entry level job. You won’t see a starting salary like that anywhere outside the east/west coast. The tech world does not operate on prestige. Even though I have a masters degree, my co-worker has an associates and he has a higher salary. Why? He has more experience than I do.
“The differentiator is what school you go to. It’s the difference between starting say at 100K per year versus $60K a year.”
That is absolutely not true, at least in the way you think it is. They may look at schools but to them, a public flagship is more desirable than a more selective college (outside of the three you mention), for a number of reasons. And the school rarely determines how much your starting salary is, it’s based on how you interview and the budget the dept has that’s doing the hiring.
Why do you suppose then that the starting pay is highest for people who come of schools like Stanford and Berkeley?
Where do you get that statistics, @ProfessorPlum168 ?
For big companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) most college hires get similar starting pay. However, if you can get into two or more of them, you can ask each to match the other and create a bidding war to increase the starting pay package. Even so, there’s certain limit of the range of negotiation.
Of course, Stanford and Berkeley students have a better chance of getting into one of the high paying companies, so if you look at average or medium starting pay, these schools have an advantage. Also, as @coolguy40 indicated, most of the “high paying jobs” are in high cost areas, such as Wall Street or Silicone Valley. In these areas, if you are making only $100K a year, you are poor.
Pay Scale study of salaries:
https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/best-schools-by-majors/computer-science?page=32
The best bargains are still the UCs, UW, CalPoly, San Jose State, UVa, Rutgers, etc.
By the way, Silicon Valley is shrinking. A lot of start-ups are going to places with a lower cost of living and lower taxes. That’s why places like Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Austin, Raleigh, and Columbus are growing at such a high rate. Jobs are more about location than college brand name. These are all places with a high education rate nearby flagship schools, where it’s cost-effective to recruit local talent.
Although Facebook has a reputation of being college-elitist, Google and other larger companies are much less so, in that they recruit widely, due to greater recruiting resources and needs. There may be some correlation to college prestige at some companies, but may be due to higher standards in technical interviews being more likely to be met by those who were able to get admitted to more prestigious colleges, not because those from lower prestige colleges were excluded.
For smaller companies, there is an advantage to being nearby, because travel recruiting is less convenient for a companies that needs only a few new employees.
Several things at play in this thread. Compensation bands are wider than many think. Even for first time hires out of college the salary can range widely. The number of stock options or RSUs offered also range quite a bit. Taken together the total compensation package can vary by $$$. The other aspect is that in any given year certain areas of expertise within CS will be more sought after than others. Taken together the starting salary can vary by considerable amounts.
Many feel that where a CS degree comes from doesn’t matter. Others (like me) think is does. Curriculum matters, alumni network matters, and yes, to some extent brand value matters. Even the recruitment experience differs. While many large tech companies will visit a campus and open up to resumes and coding tests, those same companies will make direct contact with students for specific jobs in specific groups at different schools.
In the end, yous buys your ticket yous takes your chances.
Because many, if not most, of the graduates work in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco area. The pay is high, but so is the cost of living.
A UTexas CS student living in Austin making 70k is equivalent to a Stanford CS student making 130k in Silicon Valley. Same standard of living.
If the Stanford CS student gets a job in Austin they get 70k not 130k.
The reason Stanford and UCB have higher average salaries is a circumstance of their location.
Same standard of living? Right.
I’ll grant you that a $3-4K per month apartment here in the Bay Area is steep and traffic sucks in many places, but I’ll take everything else here.