Need help with understanding my S's chances

Chance Me / Match Me
21

Oh, sorry, I misread based on their saying that their costs run less than the 38K average total cost for publics in MA, but I guess in-state must be included in that average. Yeah, looks like about 45K minus merit. Still cheaper than the Amherst flagship as a baseline, and chances of merit are much better at Lowell than Amherst for any given candidate. If Lowell doesn’t add up, I don’t see how Amherst does.

TBH, the truly affordable programs are in the midwest, not on the coasts. There’s good CS at highly affordable and high-quality schools like South Dakota Mines - they’re just not popular because they don’t have an in-demand location. For 26K/year (before any merit - I’m not sure whether there’s merit $ for intl students or not), they offer an excellent STEM education, and they have a robotics minor as well. http://ecatalog.sdsmt.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=13&poid=974&returnto=2327 U of Minnesota Morris also has a solid CS program and a sticker price of around 25K/year (with the possibility of internal transfer to the Twin Cities flagship campus - but the yearly cost there is about double). That’s about as inexpensive as it gets, short of attending a US community college for the first two years, which a fair number of international students also do.

22

A U.S. community college will be at the out of state rate. Plus…if the student is attending community college, there are only a few places where the student will still be an out of state student for the last couple of years.

In addition, most community colleges do not have dorms so the student would need to find their own housing in a strange country/city.

There are a couple of colleges where one can pay instate costs after the first year. @twoinanddone I believe you know those.

23

“We can pay around 18-20K USD annually”
“perhaps EU and Canadian colleges too”

I am pretty sure that the question regarding Canadian universities did not come from the original poster. However, I figure that I would answer anyway because there might be some schools that come close to the stated budget. Canada as a whole has also put some effort into AI.

One relatively inexpensive and very good university in Canada is Memorial University of Newfoundland. It is a bit isolated from most of Canada. Canada is a huge country, and it is on the eastern tip. However it is relatively affordable and is a good school. I do not know much about its AI or robotics programs. It does have a robotics team which has competed in the US. It also has been applying AI to solve some medical challenges.

I think that the top ranked schools in Canada would be unlikely with your son’s stats. However, there are a lot of good schools and you might also have a chance at somewhere like St Francis Xavier. It is a small university in Nova Scotia in a location which is again a bit isolated (1 hour and 45 minutes from the Halifax airport, 2 hours from Halifax) but it is in quite an attractive town. We visited when D2 was accepted there.

Regarding the Massachusetts schools, I agree that U.Mass Amherst has a great computer science program. I have worked with many graduates from there including a few of the best software engineers that I have ever met. U.Mass Amherst would be a reach. U.Mass Lowell would be safer with your son’s stats and is also worth considering. Both would be over the stated budget unless you get a really good merit based scholarship (which I would not count on). 1310 SAT with 760 math score would be quite good for Lowell, and might possibly allow some chance at a merit scholarship there.

24

Thank you very much… this is really good news for me. I will start the application right off. You don’t know how much this information has affected us. Thank you very very much.

25

Thanks for this too:-) extremely helpful for international applicants like us, who know very little insider information…we usually rely on what websites like US news and others promote.
When you say midwest- can you tell me how to search college names in this area? I mean how do I search college names based on location/zones?

26

Hmm… maybe somebody here knows how to find a list…

Certainly you can search public universities by state. And the best bargains will be found, not surprisingly, in the states that have the lowest cost-of-living and lie the farthest from the coastal cities. So, for example, Wyoming (where less than 0.2% of the US population lives, but where you’ll find the breathtaking Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks) has one of the least expensive flagship universities (I believe the cheapest but I’m not certain), with a total non-resident COA just over 30K/year before merit. (Looks like your son would be on the border between 4K/year and 7K/year merit, depending on whether they round GPA. http://www.uwyo.edu/admissions/scholarships/non-residents/bgcommitment.html ) They do indeed have robotics and AI research going on. http://www.evolvingai.org/ And U of Wyoming isn’t as remote as you might fear - it’s near the Wyoming/Colorado border, only 130 miles from the city of Denver.

It’s awfully hard to get the cost below the mid-20’s, especially if a major research university is the goal, but you can certainly get a high-quality education for much less the most internationally-famous universities charge, if you’re willing to look beyond the “usual suspects.”

27

So the question for OP, considering they are from India, is if it is really worth it for them to go all the way down to some totally unknown (at home) college to make it affordable for them (maybe - I still haven’t seen anything here that seems to get the cost all the way down to the $18-20k OP says they can afford, even assuming that sum excludes day to day costs and flights home), or whether it’s better to spend the $80k on a 3-year degree in the UK or EU.

28

^^ Very true. Nothing I’ve said is intended as argument in favor of a US education vs. UK/EU vs. India. Coming to the US may very well not be worth the additional cost. All I’m saying is that “people have heard of it in India” is not an accurate proxy for fundamental quality of education. (Not picking on India - what the average American has heard of is a terrible proxy for quality too.)

I’ll cite a California example because that’s where I’m from: there are over 1000 international undergraduates at UC Santa Cruz, and probably many/most of those are STEM majors. Now, I’m not dissing UCSC - it’s an excellent school, and an excellent value for the 90% of undergraduates that are paying the in-state price (around 35K/year) or less (because in-state students qualify for reasonably generous need-based financial aid). But every one of those 1000+ international students is paying around $65K/year for their UCSC education, because there’s no need-based aid and virtually no merit available for them. Are they getting a measurably better education than they’d get at U of Wyoming or South Dakota Mines? There are different pros and cons to each program but overall STEM graduates are going to come out with essentially the same skills and knowledge base, and in fact they may have better luck getting the classes and research experiences they want at a less overcrowded school. People are just willing to pay 2-3x as much for the name-recognition of a UC school and the Silicon-Valley-adjacent location.

Fine and good if they have the money and want to spend it that way… but if a student from India has weighed the options and decided that a US education is what they want, but does not have more than 30K/year to spend and does not have the superhuman stats needed to score a large merit award or a highly-coveted spot at one of the handful of schools that meet need for international students… then it’s good to know where one can buy a high-quality US education for around $100,000 total. Then that option can be fairly weighed against the non-US alternatives… which may indeed be a better choice, but that depends on the individual and his/her priorities. What can be said for sure is that throwing an entire family into six figures of debt for the sake of name recognition would be very foolish. (Doesn’t sound as if the OP is considering such a foolish path, but some families do!)

29

That wasn’t at all what I meant. When OP’s son goes home and starts looking for a job in India with his newly minted degree, whether people have heard of it in India will probably matter a lot.

OP said they have 18-20k/year. I still don’t see how anything outside starting at community college is really going to work financially for them in the US.

30

@SJ2727

Even a community college on $20,000 a year is going to be tight. In addition to tuition, fees, books costs, this student will also have rent, utilities, personal expenses and travel. And Health insurance which just about every college requires a student have.

Is $20,000 enough to cover those costs…anywhere? Without aid?

31

“Anywhere?” brings us back to the question of whether more obscure locations are worth paying for at all.

There are a surprising number of international students at the CC near my home. I’m honestly not sure why they choose it over other nearby CC’s with much nicer campuses and broader/deeper offerings (in terms of both course offerings and extracurriculars), but the school bears the recognizable name of the city and markets aggressively, thus padding its bottom line with lots of non-resident tuition. In a very high cost-of-living area, the estimated yearly budget is around $22K. http://www.sjcc.edu/future-students/international-students/tuition-and-fees And the ostensible goal of most of these students is to transfer to a UC (so, two years at 22K and two more at 65K, not accounting for the upward creep or for the additional time many will need). Or at the cheapest, they’d transfer to SJSU which will still be close to 45K/year.

So… the only way the CC-to-university pathway would come in under budget would be by attending CC in a state where the target public university you’d transfer to would still be affordable. And in many of those states, what you’d save on those first two years would be canceled out by the auto-merit you’d be giving up by not entering as a freshman. Plus, so much more socially challenging to have to assimilate at two different schools. IMHO it’s not a win economically or socially; it’s only a win for a student who lacks the academic record needed for freshman admissions.

Don’t mistake anything I’ve said above as an argument for overspending for a US undergrad education. My intent was merely to put forth the best case scenario in terms of a quality US education for a price that at least begins with the same digit as OP’s stated budget. That financial stretch buys an excellent education without an internationally-recognized name brand. Adding name brand costs much more. Armed with this info, OP and son seem well equipped to form their own conclusions. We don’t know the details of their actual financial resources, nor all of their goals and reasons for considering a US college. Unknown variables could sway the decision. But hopefully concrete examples help to bring clarity.

32

I personally just can’t see anything logical that argues for spending all this money on scrapping for something resembling an affordable undergrad education, rather than a cheap degree at home (which seems to be literally a fraction of the cost of the US) and then spend the money on a decent US master’s degree (which will also improve the chances of getting a H1B visa under the new rules, which may or may not be an unspoken goal here).

Do CC’s give merit to internationals?

I’m assuming OP’s son actually has some other goals in mind - like, would he want to spend 4 years in South Dakota? There are reasons other than just the quality of education people choose colleges. Would be interesting to hear what he actually wants out of a college education too?

33

As mentioned before, The University of Massachusetts at Amherst is an excellent option.

Diverse socially and economically.

Son of a very good friend is Indian and graduating this year. He wishes he could start over again. He had a vibrant group of friends in STEM, many Indian but diverse. Just an observation.

I personally would go larger versus smaller coming to a school from outside the US. The hustle and bustle plus the much larger group of students and activities to find your niche would be appealing to me. The larger international cohort at the big universities would also seem to make sense when you don’t have a specific target school or program in mind.

Best of luck too!!

34

@privatebanker , I love UMass Amherst, but how is it supposed to work on an 18-20K budget that can at best be stretched into the mid-20’s? Do you see a realistic chance of this student’s getting in the neighborhood of 30K in merit?

35

It would be nearly impossible to get to that level I’m sorry. I lost track of the particulars of the financial need of the OPs situation. My apologies OP.

At roughly 50k oos or international, a top chancellors award of say 14 to 20k and perhaps one other application grants at 2000k tops, it would be out of range even at these top levels. More like the 30k range if everything lined up perfectly. Which is hard to do, especially with the stats I’m seeing competing for Stem majors.

36

Thanks everyone. Just to clarify, there are two major things we would like to focus on (when I say we- I include my son because all this while we have mutually discussed both these factors) first our budget is tight and secondly we are looking for a good CS programme. I understand college life means much more than just studying in 'ANY" university, but we have to make trade-offs. Another thing, my son is a lot into sport but not music etc. so an any uni with sport some sport facility is good for us.

I totally agree and this is what we want.
I quite liked the idea of thinking of some ‘less-famous’ universities which impart quality education as a real way to meet both our objectives. And that is why, South Dakota Mines sounds like a good option. BTW- what is so bad about SDM- I mean I’d really like to know? Is it the location? or the people? or what? Again internet searches give very vague & biased replies which I don’t know are trustworthy. In fact why are colleges in midwest not a preferred location? is it only because they are in the interiors?

As far as US undergraduate degree is concerned, this need too stems from a very rigid & theoretical education system in India. A degree like CS/C Eng requires a lot of practical exposure, opportunities to intern (paid or unpaid doesn’t matter), direct interaction with professors, being able to TA/help doctoral students or even professors in their researches are some things we don’t find in India commonly. We consider this as wholesome & useful education. Usually, Indians don’t take big study loans, we save up education costs right from when the child is very young. So, this really takes care of the expense part. Of course the last course of action would be to settle with an Indian institute for undergraduate and then go to US/ any other country. But we want to understand our chance first at US universities close to our budget & profile of the student.

37

@MHRKHNH South Dakota School of mines has a very small international student population. According to collegedata.com, it only has a total of 2800 undergrads, out of which 2.8% are international. For a young person from India, regardless of how Westernized they may be, it may be somewhat isolating both culturally and location wise.

For your research, create a free account on that collegedata site, and click on the “students” tab. You will see info like this for every college.

I am of Indian descent and live in New Jersey. I have lived in other parts of the country, including the midwest, as a child. It’s hard to research the differences in “feel” of the different parts of the country via the Internet. In general, outside of some large cities in the midwest, you will find more diversity in the coastal states such as California, New Jersey etc… Look into NJIT, for example.

There are also other important aspects of college life besides the academic part. For students on campus, there can be exposure to underage drinking. At a college with many international students from India, things may be less of a culture shock, because there are more like minded students to hang out with. If you’re a vegetarian family, food is also less of an issue at the more diverse campuses. There are also many school breaks like winter break and spring break and Thanksgiving, when the college is closed. Do you have friends or relatives in the US as it will not be feasible to fly back to India for all those breaks? Universities with large international student population may make some accommodations, but it varies.

A good reason for coming as a Masters student is also the age. A 21 year old may have more maturity to adapt to cultural shifts in a new country than an 18 year old.

By the way, internships are not available to foreign students without sponsorship, which many companies are not willing to do. With a student visa, they are eligible for campus research jobs, but, sometimes, grant funded professors may be limited to hiring students with green card or us citizenship due to the funding agency stipulations.

38

South Dakota is not bad, if you like very very cold and long winters, and you don’t mind living in a rather isolated place. They get a ton of snow, and winter temps are frigid. Some people love that…others just hate it.

Things you need to check before your son applies…

  1. Are students admitted directly to the computer science major...or is there a bar they need to reach to apply for this as sophomores.
  2. What is the acceptance rate, and what are the stats for computer science majors. You may find that this major has much higher admissions credentials than other majors in the college.
  3. Does the CS department admit a limited number of students to the major.
  4. What else does the college offer beside computer science? There is always the chance your kid will change his mind...or won’t do well enough to continue in this competitive major. Have a plan B.
39

You do understand that not every CS undergrad actually gets to be able to TA or help research? I’m assuming in fact that not many of them do. If this is a prime motivation, it may be misplaced.

@momprof9904 already mentioned the restrictions on internships. I just wanted to add that this extends to unpaid internships- immigration law does not treat them differently.

40

I’m confused about your timeline - is your son applying to colleges this year, to enter next fall? If so the timeline to apply is getting very short. If not, then I don’t understand the statement that he doesn’t have time to retake the SAT.

There are a lot of reasons that the “middle of nowhere” schools aren’t popular with a lot of students. Many college students want to be in or near a major city. The desire to be near the coasts or at least near big cities also reflects the political divide in the US - the so-called “flyover” states tend to be more politically conservative.

So yes, attending a small school in one of the most sparsely populated and least diverse states in the US could be a big culture shock. The non-white population of South Dakota is comprised primarily of Native Americans - the is no appreciable Asian community there. (If you heard anything about the Standing Rock protests where demonstrators attempted to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline - the Standing Rock reservation spans the border between North and South Dakota. Mines is farther south, closer to the famous Mount Rushmore, for which a lovely natural rock formation was transformed into the faces of four former US presidents). The website states that 5% of the students are international; if it’s 2.8% of undergrads then there must be a higher percentage among grad students. Mines makes a big effort to highlight women, racial/ethnic minorities, and international students on social media (for example, this young woman from India https://youtu.be/lJ-l16_4ub8 ) but the school is still 80% white and almost 80% male.

Another downside is the graduation rate. This is a well-known issue for certain high-quality engineering programs in the midwest - they are easy to get into, but not all who are admitted will be willing or able to do the rigorous work. The attrition is less visible at flagship schools like Iowa State, which is known for its excellent engineering, because students who are “weeded out” of the engineering majors have lots of other programs they can move to within the university. At a specialty school like Mines, those who wash out of the STEM majors are more likely to leave the school entirely, such that only a little over 50% eventually graduate, and a minority of those actually finish in four years. (An important conversation to have with your son, because the relatively low cost of the school means that a lot of students can afford to take their time and graduate in 5-6 years, whereas extra semesters would be a big problem for you.) On the plus side, the students who do finish get a top-notch education with a very strong hands-on philosophy (and your son is probably very well prepared to be successful). More than 75% of students get internships, and the employment rate for graduates is extremely high. Employers know that Mines graduates have both the hard and soft skills that are needed in the workplace. (How this carries over to employability outside the US is a separate question into which I have little insight.)

It’s a terrific school for the right student, and an amazing financial bargain. I know students who have happily chosen it as an alternative to getting “lost in the crowd” at larger schools. But it’s not for everyone, and not a decision to make lightly. Also, a student must be accepted by January 15th to be eligible for merit scholarships. (Which brings me back to my “what’s your timeline?” question)