2024 USNWR Undergraduate Computer Science

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Remember to look at how this list is put together though. I'm not a huge fan of how USNWR does them. They basically survey a bunch of old dudes affiliated with CS programs (your kid could probably email a bunch of respected profs and industry professionals and get a better ranking):
"Top academics and officials at computer science programs rated the overall quality of undergraduate programs with which they were familiar on a 1-5 scale. A school’s undergraduate computer science rank is solely determined by its average of scores received from these surveys."

how would you rate a CS program, then?

People look at various rankings, and some on here use Poets & Quants, which is a ranking based on alumni survey.

NP. I would consider PhD rates for one thing. True, not everyone wants to pursue, but they are highly selective and students pursuing CS PhDs tend to be among the best prepared upon finishing college. Interestingly, certain LACs do very well with CS PhD placement. Swarthmore and Carleton come to mind. I think LACs tend to be be underrated in all the discipline specific rankings because administrators tend to think of schools known for their research rather than their undergrad instruction when ranking by discipline.

Ranking CS programs on PhD rates? That's silly.

Vast majority of CS grads don't pursue PhDs.

It’s a data point, but if you don’t think PhD CS programs know which undergrad programs are high quality year after year (the same schools tend to dominate over decades), then perhaps consider head to head competitions. There’s an intercollegiate CS league. Last year Carleton finished ahead of seven of the Ivies. The year before Swarthmore finished ahead of all of them.

Another interesting data point: when you cross reference the per capita PhD list and PayScale's career salary lists for computer science, 11 schools are in the top 25 of both lists:

Harvey Mudd
MIT
Stanford
CMU
Princeton
Brown
Harvard
Duke
Dartmouth
Yale
WPI

And the first 4 are in the top 10 on both lists.

Don’t forget about cost of living differences. Student populations skew towards the region and even the state a school is located in. That can deflate data for schools in the Midwest and the South on raw salary rankings.

Does that really factor in to CS though? And none of these are regional schools.

From what I have seen, most schools, even highly selective ones, pull disproportionately from the states and regions in which they are based. Moreover, students are disproportionately more likely to settle in the state or region their school was located, at least for an amount of time that would be picked up by CollegeScorecard and PayScale data. So yes I think it affects CS data. My advice is to pick a school you already trust in a given state or region to serve as a calibration for comparing other schools to.

So location is an important factor.
Who would want to live in the midwest?

About 10+ million people along with Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy and Dave Chappelle.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:UC Berkeley, being a large public school, has limited advising (long waits). I guess some students don't care about that.

My DC had no problem talking to CS adviser, faculty adviser and his research professor etc. any time it was necessary. DC commented on many substantive research opportunities even for freshmen.

I heard similarly from my nephew.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The fact that so many are clustered together shows that there is very little difference between any of the schools after the top 10.

Oh sure. #10 is the same as #82. Get real!

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Remember to look at how this list is put together though. I'm not a huge fan of how USNWR does them. They basically survey a bunch of old dudes affiliated with CS programs (your kid could probably email a bunch of respected profs and industry professionals and get a better ranking):
"Top academics and officials at computer science programs rated the overall quality of undergraduate programs with which they were familiar on a 1-5 scale. A school’s undergraduate computer science rank is solely determined by its average of scores received from these surveys."

how would you rate a CS program, then?

People look at various rankings, and some on here use Poets & Quants, which is a ranking based on alumni survey.

NP. I would consider PhD rates for one thing. True, not everyone wants to pursue, but they are highly selective and students pursuing CS PhDs tend to be among the best prepared upon finishing college. Interestingly, certain LACs do very well with CS PhD placement. Swarthmore and Carleton come to mind. I think LACs tend to be be underrated in all the discipline specific rankings because administrators tend to think of schools known for their research rather than their undergrad instruction when ranking by discipline.

Ranking CS programs on PhD rates? That's silly.

Vast majority of CS grads don't pursue PhDs.

It’s a data point, but if you don’t think PhD CS programs know which undergrad programs are high quality year after year (the same schools tend to dominate over decades), then perhaps consider head to head competitions. There’s an intercollegiate CS league. Last year Carleton finished ahead of seven of the Ivies. The year before Swarthmore finished ahead of all of them.

Another interesting data point: when you cross reference the per capita PhD list and PayScale's career salary lists for computer science, 11 schools are in the top 25 of both lists:

Harvey Mudd
MIT
Stanford
CMU
Princeton
Brown
Harvard
Duke
Dartmouth
Yale
WPI

And the first 4 are in the top 10 on both lists.

Don’t forget about cost of living differences. Student populations skew towards the region and even the state a school is located in. That can deflate data for schools in the Midwest and the South on raw salary rankings.

Does that really factor in to CS though? And none of these are regional schools.

From what I have seen, most schools, even highly selective ones, pull disproportionately from the states and regions in which they are based. Moreover, students are disproportionately more likely to settle in the state or region their school was located, at least for an amount of time that would be picked up by CollegeScorecard and PayScale data. So yes I think it affects CS data. My advice is to pick a school you already trust in a given state or region to serve as a calibration for comparing other schools to.

So location is an important factor.
Who would want to live in the midwest?

About 1 in 5 Americans.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The fact that so many are clustered together shows that there is very little difference between any of the schools after the top 10.

Oh sure. #10 is the same as #82. Get real!

It is. Linear thinking is juvenile.

[Anonymous]

You might want to look at CodeSignal's rankings:
https://codesignal.com/university-ranking-report-2023 .
Methodology is very practical:

We analyzed the results of CodeSignal’s General Coding Framework, which measures core programming and computer science fundamentals.

Our ranking is based on students’ average (mean) scores on the General Coding Framework for each educational institution.
We’ve inferred the name of educational institutions from the email domains associated with each candidate who completed the General Coding Framework.
To support valid comparisons, we’ve adopted U.S. News & World Report’s grouping of colleges and included schools that met the criteria for the “National University” group.
For our ranking analyses, we only included universities that had more than 30 student candidates.
The 2023 ranking dataset includes all student candidates with university emails who completed the General Coding Framework between April 21, 2022 and April 21, 2023 (n = 32,179).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:UVA is top 50.

Well below VT - which is tied with Northwestern and Harvey Mudd.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We toured Emory for CS recently. Small dept and limited course offerings. If you want to be in Atlanta, try GTech instead.

Yes GaTech, one of the best CS programs in East coast, almost on par with MIT and CMU.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We toured Emory for CS recently. Small dept and limited course offerings. If you want to be in Atlanta, try GTech instead.

Yes GaTech, one of the best CS programs in East coast, almost on par with MIT and CMU.

Also a very tough admit for OOS CS. They say they don't admit by major but definitely seemed an easier go for other majors last cycle. And for those of us in-state for UMD, not sure the 3x price tag is worth it.