This is it. If you look at the content of the courses, it's pretty much the same. A good department may offer more opportunities to get involved in a professor's research. More specialised upper year courses. But the general curriculum is the same.
My son is now in his mid 30s and is an IT manager at a Fortune 500 company so it worked well for him.
A solid second tier California public university should be accredited by the same organizations as some mid tier college on the other side of the country which costs twice as much but is not all that much different and may even use many of the same textbooks.
Where the top schools excel is:
- they have the best students. That means that UC Berkeley or MIT you are just going to be pressured - and having to get used to being surrounded by genius software people
- the content is accelerated. That MIT Algorithms course comes to mind (but maybe that's too basic for MIT CS majors?)
But once you get out of that very elite bracket (names to mind, not a complete list: UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon etc) education would be similar and progress would be very much down to individual ability. UI Champagne-Urbana is certainly there as a research university/ postgrad, not sure about undergrad.
I wish we had learned more about working in teams in undergrad (plagiarism rules kept us quite separated, also the "free rider" problem). Everything in software in the "real world" is done as part of a team. People who were indifferent students often excel in the "real world" because of their interpersonal skills.
Women were about 30% of our classes (high Asian component as our city had very strong links with Hong Kong in particular). But, generalising, they often were more than that in higher tiers of management because of people skills. I understand now that CS majors is about 10% women?
Would an independent counsellor be helpful in this context?It varies a lot but some high schools have good counselors who can help with the college selection process but at some high schools they may not be very helpful.She is a good student (Unweighted GPA 3.8, SAT 1460), but likely not good enough for IVY league level.
As a first generation immigrant, I'm a bit at loss about how to find good cost-effective mid-tier colleges that offer quality education in this field (Computer Science). Everybody knows what the best colleges are, but below that is not so clear. The task is made more difficult by the fact that the acceptance rates for CS are often in single digits, so I feel like casting a wide net would be in order.
My budget is around $40k per child per year (all living expenses included) for 4 years.
I think this is really about the "fit" for the student. She needs to find a college where she likes the atmosphere - as much as can be determined. The CS education she will get will be pretty similar across a broad range of colleges outside the very top tier of CS schools.
Statistics: Posted by Valuethinker — Fri Jan 05, 2024 3:42 am — Replies 20 — Views 1197