- UMASS CS is 50-100 worldwide and Alabama is not ranked.
- UMASS has a much bigger department and covers more hot research areas like machine learning.
I heard there were 450 people registered in the graduate machine learning class at MIT this past fall. That’s unbelievable! Machine learning is sizzling hot right now. It’s not really an active research area at Alabama.
If one is just taking courses, it might not matter, but if one wants to get into the hottest areas, going to a school with a research culture in those areas makes sense.