Do not send your child to Pomona if they are interested in a CS degree. The major is not guaranteed

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh…not like Pomona is known for its CS. My guess is it is the typical kids all selecting a major that they are told makes them most marketable.

I don’t know many HS kids interested in CS that have Pomona on their list. Admittedly, the list may be different if you live on the West Coast.

My kid in FCPS does but I will share this with her.

Save some money and send your kid to GMU. It's a great school for CS. Doesn't have general cache' as UVA and VT do, as an overall school. But it is top notch in CS.

[Anonymous]

It's mind-boggling how Pomona approaches this problem.

Oversubscribed demand and interest for classes in a major for which they have only 6 tenured faculty. Instead of recognizing that they need to add more faculty to support demand for this growing field, their solution is to create a cap on how many students can take these classes and major in CS. Nonsensical.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh…not like Pomona is known for its CS. My guess is it is the typical kids all selecting a major that they are told makes them most marketable.

I don’t know many HS kids interested in CS that have Pomona on their list. Admittedly, the list may be different if you live on the West Coast.

This is all wrong. Google used to interview for entry software engineering positions/internships at Pomona. No idea if they still do, but they used to be super picky about schools. The Pomona CS program is well-regarded.

But College Factual ranks the CS program at Pomona way down at 43

I think that's a website you can ignore. Their methodology explicitly states they award points to larger schools simply for being larger. Silly stuff. For the vast majority reading this thread, studying CS at Pomona would be a home run. It is true that there's cause for pause if they are resorting to random luck to determine who gets to proceed with the major, but we don't know how many have actually been impacted by that. Fifteen? Five? Zero?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh…not like Pomona is known for its CS. My guess is it is the typical kids all selecting a major that they are told makes them most marketable.

I don’t know many HS kids interested in CS that have Pomona on their list. Admittedly, the list may be different if you live on the West Coast.

This is all wrong. Google used to interview for entry software engineering positions/internships at Pomona. No idea if they still do, but they used to be super picky about schools. The Pomona CS program is well-regarded.

But College Factual ranks the CS program at Pomona way down at 43

Do you honestly think Google’s recruiters care about College Factual?

In general, DCUM is phenomenally ignorant of high tech, and that incudes high tech hiring. I would never make a decision on CS based on what I read here, and I say this as someone who had worked in Silicon Valley for 20+ years.

Pomona places a lot of kids in high tech, disproportionately so for its size.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's mind-boggling how Pomona approaches this problem.

Oversubscribed demand and interest for classes in a major for which they have only 6 tenured faculty. Instead of recognizing that they need to add more faculty to support demand for this growing field, their solution is to create a cap on how many students can take these classes and major in CS. Nonsensical.

I count 8 PhD faculty. For a typical school of that size, it's not a bad number. But for the demand they should hire more. Fortunately they do have posted both an open rank CS prof and a visiting CS asst prof.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's mind-boggling how Pomona approaches this problem.

Oversubscribed demand and interest for classes in a major for which they have only 6 tenured faculty. Instead of recognizing that they need to add more faculty to support demand for this growing field, their solution is to create a cap on how many students can take these classes and major in CS. Nonsensical.

I count 8 PhD faculty. For a typical school of that size, it's not a bad number. But for the demand they should hire more. Fortunately they do have posted both an open rank CS prof and a visiting CS asst prof.

Of the 8, one is on sabbatical for the full year, one is a dean, and the other is a visiting lecturer. That means only 5 tenure track faculty.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's mind-boggling how Pomona approaches this problem.

Oversubscribed demand and interest for classes in a major for which they have only 6 tenured faculty. Instead of recognizing that they need to add more faculty to support demand for this growing field, their solution is to create a cap on how many students can take these classes and major in CS. Nonsensical.

I count 8 PhD faculty. For a typical school of that size, it's not a bad number. But for the demand they should hire more. Fortunately they do have posted both an open rank CS prof and a visiting CS asst prof.

Of the 8, one is on sabbatical for the full year, one is a dean, and the other is a visiting lecturer. That means only 5 tenure track faculty.

As best I can tell, the dean still teaches. The lecturer, fwiw, has been around for 4 years and is not listed as visiting, but is apparently shared with another institution. So maybe 6.5 faculty? I am not implying they don’t need more, just trying to nail down where they currently are, staffing wise.

[Anonymous]

These posts are HILARIOUS. "Inexcusable"..."Crossing off the list"..."what are AOs doing" Pomona has a 7% acceptance. Your sweetheart isn't going to be accepted anyway. Karen all you want, they don't need your kid's application.

[Anonymous]

Woah - that is big news.

[Anonymous]

My non CS major kid and their friends didn’t have any problem getting what they wanted. Many are doing double majors or minors. There are hundreds of kids waitlisted for CS though. I think it’s avoidable. CS kids should go to Mudd.

[Anonymous]

Mudd and Pomona are very different. Mudd requires an extensive core curriculum emphasizing STEM. Pomona doesn't. Someone looking to double major in non-stem and CS would go to Pomona.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My non CS major kid and their friends didn’t have any problem getting what they wanted. Many are doing double majors or minors. There are hundreds of kids waitlisted for CS though. I think it’s avoidable. CS kids should go to Mudd.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've hired plenty of software developers; Pomona is highly regarded.

To me it's disappointing but not shocking that a school with even its resources has to cap the number of CS majors. That's been going on for decades at larger public universities, and it was probably always a matter of time before we saw it happening at well endowed privates.

What's more disturbing, frankly, is the description posted about who gets to major. As I understand things, it comes down to random luck regarding who gets to register for the overcrowded classes before the deadline to declare. That's not how it should work. The best students should be given priority. Those with a higher GPA in related courses should have some registration advantage over those who did worse. I would be livid if I had a 4.0 child lose a seat in the major to someone with, say, a 3.0 because of pure randomness. Hopefully I am misreading things.

You're understanding it correctly- it'd be random luck. They're not distinguishing between the strongest students to be able to continue with the major. I think it's a LAC thing to have completely open majors regardless of past experience or skill. Universities are the ones that make distinctions about who can study what discipline.

There are plenty of non-LAC that have open majors. Just have to look outside at smaller private universities (think 5-6K undergrads). My engineering kid specifically targeted those, which is a good thing as they decided to add CS as a minor during freshman year. It was simple, just register for the first 2 courses and get at least a C and you can minor in it (or major). Would hate for my kid to be somewhere they couldn't do that with any major.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh…not like Pomona is known for its CS. My guess is it is the typical kids all selecting a major that they are told makes them most marketable.

I don’t know many HS kids interested in CS that have Pomona on their list. Admittedly, the list may be different if you live on the West Coast.

This is all wrong. Google used to interview for entry software engineering positions/internships at Pomona. No idea if they still do, but they used to be super picky about schools. The Pomona CS program is well-regarded.

Yes, Pomona is well regarded at Google (and within big tech more generally). Kids can still take classes at Harvey Mudd and CMC, right? Skillset wise, I'd advise against being too narrowly focused on CS as an undergrad anyway.

They are trying to bar kids from the major by making it impossible to get the intro classes needed. Students should just take the same class at another school and declare the major. Their art history department has 6 professors- the same as CS even though almost a quarter of the students want to major in CS. It's not the kids' fault- it's the administration who don't know how to allocate resources

The letter specifically says you can’t take the intro courses at another institution.

A disturbing detail is that access to the required classes is basically by lottery. There ought to be some way for students to increase their chances via grades, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My non CS major kid and their friends didn’t have any problem getting what they wanted. Many are doing double majors or minors. There are hundreds of kids waitlisted for CS though. I think it’s avoidable. CS kids should go to Mudd.

Maybe they couldn't get in.