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Comment by kenhwang | Hacker News Reader

I think the bucketing of schools by overall rank is about as good as arbitrary. Why not rank by strength of CS program? If we use PayScale's "Computer Science Majors by Salary Potential"[1] as an indicator for interview success, it looks very much like the CS rankings.

[1] https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/best-schools-...

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That's not very far off from general prestige. Harvard is too low, but only UCSD, UW, and maybe CMU wouldn't be on the list if it were that instead. And flipping it around missing from that list are University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and maybe Northwestern. (Also Caltech but it's tiny.)

For Phd programs there are some real surprises, but for undergraduates there's not much in the way of major specific strength differences. That's largely because the strength of an undergraduate program is mostly a function of the strength of the matriculants not faculty.

> Why not rank by strength of CS program? If we use PayScale's...

CS alone is far from representative of tech industry in the aggregate.

Furthermore, PayScale's list clearly doesn't control for locality bias--e.g. consider Purdue #191, UW Madison #138, UM Ann Arbor #88, UT Austin #79 to name a few; or what Duke #10 while UNC Chapel Hill #67 even means?? How do top programs which feed industry around tech hubs like Austin and Research Triangle meaningfully compare to the Bay Area and NYC if unadjusted gross salary serves as the sole basis of value?

Also, those numbers are absurdly low in my experience. It claims that Purdue's starting is $64,000, but I don't know a single person who's graduated and started at less than $75k, and I know plenty more that have started well into six figures.

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