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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We just hired five recently CS graduates in our technology division; one from CMU, one from Northeastern, one from UCLA, one from UVA, and one from GMU.  All of them were offered the same salary at 115K/year.  In other words, the graduate from GMU makes the same salary as the graduate from CMU and Northeastern, and the cost to attend GMU is more than less than half of CMU and Northeastern.  [/quote]

This is actually a weak case. People here dis GMU, but it’s a major, prestigious research university with a great faculty. Only ignorant people would see GMU as being a significantly worse school for business-minded CS undergraduates than UVA it Northeastern. Obviously, a great GMU CS major will be at the same level, in terms of ability to code for the government or a company, as a typical CMU CS major.

Another reason that this is a weak case is that you’re not giving us denominators.

How many CMU alum applied, and how many did you hire? Where did the applicants from CMU rank in their class?

And the same for Northeastern, UVA, etc.

Especially given that GMU is a fine school in a great location, maybe the figures ARE comparable. But it’s possible that you’re getting applications from below-average CMU grads and the top GMU grads.

I think a much more persuasive way you could make your point would be if you could look through your hiring spreadsheet and do some kind of analysis where you adjust for class rank and student SAT differences, AND you show results for universities that are clearly at a much lower academic level than Northeastern or UVA, such as Directional State Tech That Has Two CS Professors Who Used to be the Oboe Professors.

Other issues here:

- You don’t really know what applicants paid for their degrees. For many applicants from poor or broke families, the after-aid cost of schools like CMU and Northeastern may be much lower than the after-aid cost of GMU.

- Even at a hard quantitative level, there are a lot of other factors that can go into analyzing value. Example: a private schools tend to do more to
nurse kids toward getting degrees. It’s possible that Northeastern has better alternatives than GMU for would-be CS majors who get weeded out. And maybe it does so much more to maximize graduation rates that, once you adjust for the difference in the percentage of GMU students who flunk out entirely, the flunking-out-adjusted cost of a degree from GMU is a lot more comparable to the flunking-our-adjusted cost of a degree from Northeastern, even for full-pay students.

- For some parents who have enough money not to get much aid from CMU or Northeastern, the idea of their kids blooming at a college of their choosing might have a high value. Personally, I’m a donut hole person myself, not rich, but my main reason for sending my son to college is that he’s a wonderful, bright, serious, hard-working kid who likes hanging out with other bright, serious kids, and it seems as if he could have a great time in college. I just want him to learn something and have good clean fun. We aren’t going into debt to send him away, but, if he’d gotten into CMU, and all that stood between him and CMU was a need for some loans, I would have taken out some loans.

- Times change. Right now, demand for CS majors is high. But shifts in the economy could change that. If demand for CS majors cools, the perceived quality of the alma mater could matter more.

- If AI eliminates a lot of coding jobs, that could improve the relative standing of grads from more sophisticated programs that give students a better background in the theoretical aspects of CS. My guess is that, in general, the more prestigious CS programs tend to teach more theory.

- Even now, CS people face a lot of age discrimination. In the long run, even under current conditions, it seems possible that CS grads from flexible, possibly more prestigious schools that encourage them to take a wide range of solid courses might be better equipped to change careers than CS students who mostly just learned to code. [/quote]

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