Ask HN: What are some colleges that provide quality undergraduate CS programs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some colleges that provide quality undergraduate CS programs?

3 pointsybd3 comments

Being a high school student applying to college myself, Ragan Wald's weblog (linked below) caused a bit of concern for me. What sort of colleges is Ragan Wald referring to? Are universities with supposedly top notch CS programs beginning to dumb down the curriculum too? I ask this because I am planning to major in CS and actually do want my education to focus on a lot of theory rather than purely practical aspects. I enjoy learning about stuff like machine learning, compiler design, computability theory, NLP, etc. So after reading that article I'm a bit unsure over whether this is a widespread issue for even the best computer science schools. Thanks in advance!

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/01/no-disrespect.html

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I don't think it's purely an issue of quality so much as exactly what you want (though quality also does vary). It seems that what you're asking for is actually slightly different than the linked blog post: that post is arguing for a stronger emphasis on software engineering, whereas you seem somewhat more interested in CS theory (they overlap, but different schools are stronger/weaker in different parts, partly because everything you really ought to know is >4 year curriculum, so schools have to pick a subset).

For example, Cal Poly is a very good school on the software-engineering side of the spectrum, with a heavy emphasis on C++ programming, OS/systems, software-engineering methods actually used in industry, etc. But it's not where you'd go if you were primarily interested in PLs theory, algorithms, etc.; the number of Haskell-expert or world-class computability-theory professors is much smaller than the number of world-class systems and software-eng professors.

For theory-heavy undergrad schools that are of high quality, one approximate metric is what proportion of graduates go on to get PhDs in CS, which indicates that the undergrad program successfully prepared people for that route. I believe Harvey Mudd is the highest on that metric, but Carnegie Mellon, Caltech, and probably a dozen other schools I'm blanking on also have well-regarded, theory-heavy undergrad programs.

"Did your university have a strict cap on the number of undergraduates entering the CompSci program? No? Then your degree has absolutely zero leverage."

The unquestioned top 4 CS schools in the world (especially so because people can't agree on what's the 5th, 6th, etc.) are in no particular order Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU and MIT. Of these 4, CMU is the only one I know with a cap (of 135 students). MIT has none, and if the admissions office judges that you can do the work (generally) you have a raw 1 out of 3 chance of getting accepted (each year about 3,000 of the applicants are judged so, there are not quite 1,100 slots available).

You aren't going to find too many people who both respect CS and think MIT's degree "has absolutely zero leverage".

MIT has recently changed it's curriculum; I think for the worse, but only to a very small degree might it be considered "dumbed down" (to the extent they're serious that a lot of what was in SICP/6.001 is now taught in 6.005 ... in Java...; look for discussions on Python replacing Scheme if you're interested in this). However, if you go there you'll have no trouble getting access to excellent instruction in all the topics you're interested in.

I know Carnegie Mellon University is at the top of its field, especially in regards to machine learning. Different schools will have different strengths in CS subfields, though for your undergraduate experience I imagine this will be less important than a general, well-rounded CS education.

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