What are the best colleges for computer science?

sakky
Tue, 19 Jul 2005 18:44:14 +0000

I’ll let im_blue answer this one definitely, but from what I can tell, whether a school has grade deflation or not doesn’t really matter for the purposes of Stanford PhD EE admissions. This is not like med school or law school. The PhD adcoms actually care about where you got your grades and how solid they are. They are not going to be fooled that you want out and racked up easy A’s in Rocks for Jocks the way that law school and med-school adcoms often are. This is why it is far more common to see a guy with modest grades (but demonstrates excellent potential for research) beating out people with strong grades in getting into top PhD programs than to see a guy with modest grades beating out guys with better grades in getting into top law schools.

However, none of that is here nor there. This whole digression started because we started talking about how Harvard does not have a highly ranked CS program, whereas Illinois and CMU do, and hence it was asserted that if you want to eventually get into a top-ranked CS graduate program, you should turn down Harvard in favor of Illinois or CMU (although whether anybody here would truly turn down Harvard for Illinois or CMU for undergrad seems pretty dubious to me). I would argue that if I was faced with that scenario, I would go to Harvard and major not in CS, but rather in math (or perhaps I would double in CS and math). After all, as I had shown in my other post, many of the most prominent computer scientists in the world majored not in CS for undergrad, but rather in math. You clearly don’t need a CS bachelor’s to get into a CS graduate program - a math bachelor’s works just fine. And I think we can all agree that the Harvard math program is extremely rigorous and strong. If you can do well in the Harvard math program, then I think it’s safe to say that you can handle the rigor of a graduate CS program.