EA Class of 2022

PengsPhils
Sun, 25 Mar 2018 17:35:54 +0000

@ohiocollegemom

…at Preview Day, the Faculty Advisor for the Computer Science session told the small group of us that they’ll take anyone, even if that student has had no prior experience coding or interest in coding. Their goal is to make everyone a coder. Quite honestly, we were shocked to hear that comment.

This is absolutely the case and the point of the introductory curriculum here. However, that doesn’t mean that the applicant quality isn’t more competitive for CS, simply that CS extracurriculars are not the driving force of accepted/denied or success within the major once accepted. I can’t say how closely the college and admissions work either, which could also affect it. That comment is accurate though, sans the “or interest” part. You’ve gotta be interested to take the course - no one’s forcing that or anything. I think that was a likely misquote, but the general philosophy holds - you don’t need prior experience or be “good with computers” to learn and become skilled in CS. Some of the top students often come in with very little practical computer skills, but it goes to show that CS is simply not that. As you go through the major though, you tend to pick up those practical skills over time.

Some of the other prospective students picked up on the comment and asked questions like, if I am the kind of kid who has years of programming, will I be challenged at NEU?

The curriculum is actually so unique that it can even be a harder to come in with prior experience, at least for the first semester. You have to unlearn a lot of bad practices, where people without experience are tabula rasa.

It’s a tough business, and I believe they miss out on some very good students in the long run.
…
There are administrations that invest in the educational reputation of the school and there are administrations that invest in the engineering of the numbers.

The problem is that it’s been pretty consistently shown that caring about the numbers leads to a better education reputation, more money to improve the education quality, etc. I’m sure that there’s a very careful calculation going on here: the number of top students missed out on is probably made up for in the increased resources / reputation / academics in the long term. The reality of the college landscape today is that schools have limited spots and top applicants are becoming more common, which means that the schools have more qualified applicants they can accept and have to reject many. The result is that applicants need more and more applications in order to have viable choices, which only causes more rejections. That’s why yield management has become a really tough problem, as seen with the overenrollment of Northeastern/BU/BC last year. From their perspective, it’s probably better to deny a few very qualified applicants than have to worry about huge overenrollment.

Frankly, the pattern won’t change unless there is a drastic change to the college application process. I could see some sort of ranked list single application + financial preferences document working, where you know the applicant’s other options and their admission results and thus can better predict yield and even logically withdraw applications for students based on preferences/financials, but that’s a huge system that I don’t see happening anytime soon.