My point is that choosing a college just for a major is a personal choice. A major is not a specialization. Relatively in depth study is part of undergraduate studies but depending on the school and degree, the major adds up to 30-40% of coursework. One can choose one’s school just for these classes and consider the other classes as irrelevant, or one can consider other factors as equal to quality of major. This is true for CS majors as well as other majors.
Another consideration would be internships. Which will give you more of an opportunity to earn credit for internships?
I think this horse is long dead here (so much so I believe that this is the second time I’ve used this metaphor on this thread alone) - rephrasing the same question is going to lead down the same paths.
Earning credit for internships means nothing for CS education. The value of internships is the work experience itself, not any credit you get from a school for work you already did.
^^Agree 100%. Experience.
Also, CS majors who get internships typically get paid internships.
@PengsPhils Ok, point taken, drop the credit part then. Which CS colleges will enable you the best internships?
that would depend on where you want to intern - if it’s silicon valley, a Cal or western school would definitely help, they can get good CS students locally and don’t have to spend money on recruiting. And it doesn’t have to be a brand name school.
Privates - Stanford, Harvey Mudd, USC, Cal Tech, Santa Clara
Publics - most UCs, CSU - SLO, San Jose State
OOS - ASU, UWash, and further out , MIT CMU, Illinois, Michigan
Digital Wesleyan:
California schools can make it easier but any good CS school will be recruited at by lots of Silicon Valley companies. Co-op programs can also be a big help at places like GT, Waterloo, Northeastern, RPI, and RIT.
Just about any good CS school will be a fine option for getting internships. I still wouldn’t really focus much there. Co-op schools and slightly different in that you intern for a longer period of time (up to 6-8 months) and the career center usually helps in keeping a large database of jobs from semester to semester, and co-op programs usually include more than one. In the end, it usually means its a 5-year program but you graduate with a lot more experience. It’s not needed for CS but has its advantages/disadvantages. That would be the only notable thing I would consider for “internships”, especially at the caliber of schools you intend to look at.
Rutgers seems to have a pretty good internship program. http://careers.rutgers.edu/page.cfm?page_id=281
Companies are professionals. University curriculums are pre-professional oriented. Number of university grads are much more than those of LACs. So a random professional is likely to be more familiar with university names.
Students in top LACs experience constant recruitment from top tech companies, spanning the entire year, both for internship and jobs. I know some people will be skeptical on this info, so don’t just take my words. Check it for yourself.
Fewer number of LAC grads in tech companies doesn’t mean that the acceptance rate is low, because there are a lot fewer total grads from LACs each year.
In principle, LACs’ philosophy is not pre-professional. It strives for something more idealistic. You decide whether that is practical. However, their higher rates on PhD-earner feeding implies long-term readiness for grad studies.
I’d be careful with that claim. I’d argue it’s a self-selecting phenomenon. Those who attend LAC’s are more likely to be academically interested in a Ph.D. compared to students at universities. Though I’d need a more specific definition of “PhD-earner feeding”, as I’m either not sure what you intend to say there or am not familiar with the term. Do you mean acceptance rate into Ph.D programs, attendance of Ph.D. programs, earnings of Ph.D. graduates, or something else? Frankly, I think either way you slice it, there are many factors at play so that isolating to undergraduate school type to make the claim is dubious at best, and the self selecting effect is going to be a part of most of those.
Speaking of CS majors and LACs:
https://www.haverford.edu/college-communications/news/richard-phillips-18-wins-computing-research-association-award
^^ The best available PhD production data is the NSF/WebCASPAR data.
That data does not track program admissions, it tracks PhD completions. LACs seem to compete very well with research universities for per capita alumni PhD completions. We can speculate about the role self-selection might play in those high completion rates, but as far as I can tell, we don’t have sufficient data to determine if higher completion rates are largely attributable to higher application rates. I think it is reasonable to presume that high-production LACs must be doing a good job of motivating and preparing their students for graduate work. Those students apparently aren’t being hindered by a lack of advanced courses in the LAC curriculum.
IMO, self-selection probably is a factor, but if so, that begs the question of why more LAC students would be motivated to pursue PhDs. It may be the case that a higher level of student-faculty engagement at LACs tends to make their students more motivated and better prepared for graduate work, and that this advantage outweighs any disadvantage from more limited course selection. Whether such a trade-off favors all majors (including CS) equally is another question.
Cousin recently majored in computer science at Princeton and worked for very famous large tech company in SV. His take on this is that the hiring is all about skill acquisition-the name of the school was almost irrelevant once you were in the interviews coding for 8 hours. One could acquire those skills anywhere, but yes, his level of skills was behind those of more technically oriented college grads,and he would only suggest a LAC to those with substantial outside commitment to computer programming so the skills would be acquired independently. Many computer students have pre-existing outside experience and that can help in skills acquisition.
@PengsPhils It is an information published by NSF in 2012. It’s basically a sorted list of institutes based on the percentage of their graduates who eventually earned PhD, categorized into fields of study. Self selecting effect is obvious, but my point is to dispute the claim in the original post, that BS degrees from research universities are worth infinitely more than BA in CS from top LACs. The claim automatically ignores students’ background, so self selecting or not is no longer an issue. The claimer defined worthiness based on business/industrial perspectives. I merely mentioned that worthiness doesn’t limit only to that view. Readiness to continue study into the most advanced level of the field is also worthwhile, and can be well achieved from good LACs.
I feel like that seems pretty obvious: students who are more interested in pure academics (learning for the sake of learning) will be more likely to attend a LAC. Those interested in pure academics are more likely to pursue a Ph.D.
No argument here, this is a 4-month-old thread and I think most agree with that. This thread just more or less went in circles for 15 pages when it was first posted.