Poll: Universities for Aspiring Hacker? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Universities for Aspiring Hacker?

22 pointstokenadult60 comments

In the United States, it is application season now for admission into universities and colleges. I wonder what would be good research universities to consider for a student who desires to found a Web-service start-up as soon as possible, just after or while double majoring in math and computer science. The poll choices exclude some "obvious" fine universities, but please mention those in comments to this post if you like.

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You're missing some major ones with top notch CS departments:

* Carnegie Mellon

* Berkley

* MIT

* Stanford

* UIUC

* Wisconsin

If someone thinks s/he can get into Columbia or Brown, s/he has a shot at any of these.

I'm bias, but I'll tell you a bit about UIUC. We've got something called work life balance (pretty much every party scene imaginable: frat, hacker, LGBT, sober, etc). We're also a top five CS program, ranked as the #1 most wired college by PC Magazine (2008), and ranked a top 25 program for entrepreneurship education by Entrepreneur magazine. Feel free to pass my email along (in my profile) to whoever is applying to college. I've given advice to several HNers on what it's like to study CS at UIUC.

Of course, you have to get over the fact that you're in central Illinois.

EDIT: A few words about large versus small CS departments. Small CS departments tend to be much more traditional and suffer from a severe lack of systems. This means they usually are heavy on the theory and things like security and web application programing are limited or nonexistent. Large CS departments have more money, more professors, and more to offer in terms of subject area. Make sure you look at the course catalog from the last several years for each place.

I second that. A decade ago my son was looking into schools. None of the ones in the poll were on his list, but CMU, Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford from yours were. He also looked at Washington and Harvey Mudd, and ended up going to Berkeley.

I would love to go to Harvey Mudd. I've heard nothing but good things about that school.

You're missing some major ones with top notch CS departments

Yes, that was intentional, because the universities you kindly mentioned are familiar as universities with strong CS departments. I appreciate your other comments about chances at Brown and Columbia relative to chances at the other universities, and especially the specifics about UIUC. (I've been to the campus. We live near a different Big Ten university.) I was also intentionally not mentioning state universities (making the assumption that most applicants will apply to the in-state state university), but that is a category of universities I would like to know more about.

I appreciate your other comments about chances at Brown and Columbia relative to chances at the other universities

Sure. This NYTimes article is useful in that it gives you the raw numbers behind admissions to Columbia and Brown: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/a-few-more-col.... You can see they're brutally low.

I was also intentionally not mentioning state universities (making the assumption that most applicants will apply to the in-state state university), but that is a category of universities I would like to know more about.

State universities get a bad rap because their public view not exciting. Some examples: in Iron Man Tony Stark was wearing an MIT sweatshirt and in Swordfish, Stanley Jobson was a graduate from CalTech. State universities will never be able to replicate that kind of effect, an effect which is very important to young people.

That being said, once you examine reality, state universities can be quite exciting. Here are some bullets for you (sorry it's from UIUC again, but it's the one I know the most about):

* Paypal's founder and two cofounders of YouTube went to UIUC.

* Awesome speakers pass through regularly (I saw Larry Wall last year, I saw Alan Kay a couple of days ago, and I'm planning to see Stephen Wolfram tomorrow).

* There are a lot of hacker-like places on campus. For example, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications invented the first popular graphical web browser. There's also Wolfram Research with Mathematica and Wolfram alpha.

* The Department of Energy and private utilities are essentially dumping money into the Information Trust Institute for securing the powergrid. In fact, there's a conference next week with tons of interesting speakers on this topic.

* A $30,000 dollar prize (the Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize) is awarded each year to the student who "has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or demonstrated remarkable inventiveness in other ways."

>> Of course, you have to get over the fact that you're in central Illinois

As someone who lives in Central Illinois, I'll take issue with your comment. While it's not quite the same as living in New York, there's a lot to like about living here. There's plenty of things to do, and you're only two hours away from either Chicago or St. Louis. Post-college, it's a great place to raise kids. The cost of living here is ridiculously low compared to places like California.

Um. What's there to do in Chambana, apart from driving really fast to Chicago? No offense (I'm sure it really is good to raise a family there), but I've been there a lot, and I have a lot of friends that went there, and the location has been amost universally pointed out as a downside.

I have no doubt that it's a great place to raise a family. It feels much more honest than California or New York; there's certainly something to be said about the benefits of midwestern values. I certainly didn't mean to offend. A decade from now I might raise a family here too, for all I know.

However, as a college student, depending on what you're into, you'll end up distributing your social time between frat parties, gatherings at a friend's apartment, campus bars, and Chambana bars (for those unfamiliar with the area, bars let you in at 19 years old). Note that half of those places are filled with frat dudes. Not too much diversity there.

In terms of academics, the isolation is a bit difficult as well. I can't tell you how many security conferences and user group meetings I've wanted to go to in the past year that are all in Chicago. Although for job related stuff, companies will usually fly you out from our airport, so at least you don't have to go to Midway or O'hare.

Course catalogs tell you nothing. They're stuffed with appealing descriptions of courses which may or may not end up on the schedule, and when they do, may or may not resemble the description in the catalog. Not to mention the teachers' knowledge level; I once attended a cryptography lecture by a professor who didn't know the difference between public and private keys...

I intend to recommend to my kids (and anyone that ever asks my thoughts) to ignore doing a CS degree and do some form of engineering undergraduate degree and then do CS as your postgraduate degree.

An engineering degree was the best choice I ever made (my particular field was electronics but I don't think it really matters) as it instantly gave me a lot of credibility and employability (my current employer met me for lunch to check I wasn't a psycho and hired on the spot).

This does have relevance to your question however: engineering taught me a lot about working hard on a project to get it up to scratch, iterative development, management (they taught us lots of management stuff - 60-70% of my peers went on into management post-grads.jobs), team work, presentations (SUCH and important skill).

It definitely prepped me better to run a startup than a CS degree would have. At the moment I am working on my startup idea at the same time as finishing up (well, 10 months left) a post graduate masters in CS from the Open University (distance learning; but the seriously top notch stuff). The end result should be maximum employability with solid experience AND CS training :D

It's not for everyone, and CS is a great choice too (if you pick a good one). But it's worth considering strongly as an option!

As I said I'm still "developing" this approach; in a few years we'll see how it really turns out!

EDIT: incidentally I think a really good Electronic Engineering degree can teach you a lot of great hacker skills. Skills like automatically wanting to look inside the "black box" to find out what your playing with come naturally to me where I know "pure CS" types sometimes lose track (the down side is I am shaky on some of the pure CS...)

From my perspective at CMU, Engineers here tend to learn processes and heuristic approaches to problems. Computer Scientists are forced to learn to do things with almost no heuristic guidelines whatsoever. The net result is less likelihood of experiencing a problem in real life and saying "I can't do this, I didn't take that class!" which happens all the time.

Beyond that, there's a heavy emphasis on the nitty-gritty technical stuff like writing an operating system and implementing malloc and even buffer overflows. You really go all the way down to system architecture basics and all the way up to functional programming/algorithms/logic/etc. I think the breadth is very helpful in that it gives you a big "tool kit" for when you need to attack much more specific problems later in life.

> The net result is less likelihood of experiencing a problem in real life and saying "I can't do this, I didn't take that class!" which happens all the time.

With all due respect that is the kind of attitude I wouldnt expect in an Engineer (and possibly see in a CS graduate). It probably depends largely on the course.

I was taught5, in a very techncal way, how to approach a problem you have no experience in (in fact this was the third lecture of my first semester - and they ground it into use over the course of the following year). I'm perfectly happy being thrown ASP code (for example, never coded in ASP) and told to fix it because of that.

The system architecture stuff is what I am missing; and it's been a bit tough to catch that up. Luckily it;s not been essential so far but I can see where it might become a problem in the future.

At the end of the day I guess it comes down to which approach syncs more with you as an individual - and where you think you can gain the most help/skills.

This is one of the two things I am now wishing I would have done. When I finished my CS degree many recruiters told me they don't hire CS grads, they hire engineers and teach them to program. I would have done an Electrical Engineering degree if I could do it again.

The other mistake I made was transferring back home to the state school. I didn't want to go in debt from school, which was what I was about to do. I started at New Mexico Tech (which except for being in the middle of no where is an awesome hacker school imo, it should be on the list; they control the VLA on campus btw).

What are your thoughts on Computer Engineering?

ErrantX: I'd like to hear your thoughts on this as well (you mentioned you were an EE)

Honestly, never really come across it (got any examples so I can browse the content?).

I imagine that might combine the best of both worlds; but that's just from the name :)

Here you are: http://www.ece.cornell.edu/ugradhndbk/#CommonCurriculum http://www.ee.duke.edu/undergrad-education http://www.ele.uri.edu/ugprog/computer/curriculum/

Computer Engineering (CE) also sometimes at some institutions goes by the name of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). My hunch is they are the one and the same.

A lot of that does look very similar to the degree I did (it was a Electronic and Embedded Systems and Engineering so had a little more focus on the digital). In fact the only huge difference was more "electronics" work and little less pure maths (but more physics and chemistry).

I guess my degree was pushing into the CS arena and CE is pushing the other way.

The first of your link looks like a perfect course for me :D

I don't know much about it or what's involved in the course work. I never looked into it and didn't know anyone doing CE.

However, I have heard it can be one of the toughest degrees to complete.

Sorry for the late reply.

University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

I'm a freshman here at umich. I considered many of those same schools above and was down to WashU and umich in the end. I chose here because the computer science department and engineering school in general is far better, and the size of the school means there are simply amazing resources available.

Even more so, entrepreneurship is HUGE on this campus. I'm doing a web startup right now, and the resources are unbelievable. There's a large community of student web startups ( > 15 in one startup founder group here), a big student entrepreneurship organization (MPowered) that among other things supports startups, and centers for entrepreneurship at both the business and engineering schools that support you with advice and help you get seed money.

As well, with it being a huge school with so many of its programs in the top 10, there's so much going on and so many random people you can talk to. My first few weeks of freshman year, I met with political science, engineering, and informatics professors to talk about my project to get some advice, and all were open to taking some of their time just to chat with a random freshman about his project.

If you want to hear more, send ME an email (NOSPAM == @) afeldman NOSPAM pamiproductions.com

EDIT: As well, being a big school, there of course is every social group imaginable around, and there are always people around who want to go have fun and others who want to work, and others who want to do both. I know it sounds like it above but I really, really love being here, especially as a web startup founder.

Cornell. Having been to both Cornell and UMich, Cornell is vastly superior in CS. UMich does have a lot of support for entrepreneurship though, which is ironic because it's an absolutely awful place to start a business (the unions are ridiculously strong here.)

I'm biased but I think Georgia Tech has a good CS program.

Atlanta doesn't have as big as a web entrepreneur presence as some cities, but it's easy to get started in a city that is significantly cheaper than most. There are regular meetups where local entrepreneurs get together and talk about what they need and how to make the city even better for technology startups.

A brand new coworking space has opened up: http://www.ignitionalley.com/ Setup in part by HN user timdorr

I'll second that. I found Tech's program to be both practical and "humble". The program may have changed, but there was rampant grade DEflation and general hardassery that lead to poor GPAs but excellent work ethic. I used to take offense to that, since the MIT and Stanford kids had more opportunities, but if you plan to work for by yourself, for yourself, being a productive, dedicated, no-nonsense engineer is exactly what you need.

If you are considering Washington University St. Louis, then you should definitely also consider UCSB College of Creative Studies (in terms of CS dept rankings). The academic structure* is extremely similar to that of Brown University, and the CS students form almost a brotherhood. It's pretty awesome. Awesome enough that the guy who made the Cydia store still hangs out there because he likes the atmosphere.

* Super amounts of academic freedom, drop/add anytime, take grad student courses, have keys to buildings, special access to CS professors both within UCSB CCS and UCSB at large, and more :)

Disclaimer: if I hadn't chosen Brown, I would have chosen UCSB CCS. UCSB would have been way more expensive for me than Washington University St. Louis, but if Brown hadn't been an option I would have chosen UCSB CCS. (In case it wasn't clear, I had a choice between the three places and also had visited them all)

Consider some smaller colleges as well, where there's a chance your professors might learn your name. Olin, for example. Otherwise, had I the chance to go undergrad again, I might go for UCSB CCS.

Shameless promo: If you have the option to apply to schools in the UK, I just started a PhD at Imperial, and I'm highly impressed by the undergrads here. They appear to learn Prolog, Haskell and Java in their first year. One built a Haskell EDSL that autocompiles to CUDA as his undergrad thesis - another guy got a summer UROP writing embedded C for a satellite. Last week in the comp. lab I almost stepped on an EeePC some kids had turned into a little autonomous robot. Some 3rd-years were in my lab the other day arguing with a PhD about safety when compiling STM to static locks.

If you want to found a web service startup, just do it now. There really isn't any reason to wait until after college.

University won't make any difference in that specific goal and will probably slow it down because you'll have lots of classwork to do. In any event, the point of college is really to explore as much of yourself as you can and learn about ideas you would never have on your own. It's entirely likely that 4 years from now Web services will be passe and we'll have moved on to something else. Either that, or in college you'll find something you think is even cooler.

What if one of the applicant's concerns is finding a capable co-founder, ideally one with a complementary skill set?

Then they should open the search to more places than just one campus. Capable co-founders do not just exist in universities, many did not even attend university, or at least left there recently.

Looking at your list, I see universities that have some amount of cachet or prestige, but not necessarily with specifically solid Engineering/CS programs. Further, many of them are in locations that are not traditional startup hubs (StL, Nashville, Philly, Cleveland, RI, etc.).

If your goal is truly focused completely on starting a tech startup after completing your degree, then you should be looking for:

1. Location. Go somewhere where you can find and meet like-minded people and the resources to help you get going. San Francisco, NYC, Boston, Chicago, maybe Austin. Cities with established startups and college towns are both great for this. PG conveys similar opinions in his essays about startup hubs.

2. A good CS department. You'll need fellow developers. Mine them from a good CS department.

3. Being in a school that is known to generate lots of startups is certainly helpful. Think Stanford, Berkeley, MIT.

Keep in mind, this is coming from someone who spent 3 semesters at Rice (before transferring to UT Austin).. It's a great school, but I would not choose it as a place to get a startup kicked off.

I'd also like to backup tsally's comments about large vs. small CS programs. This is the primary reason why I left Rice (although I was EE, not CS). The school is too small and the CS and EE programs did not offer the breadth of topics that the larger schools do.

Since NYU seems to be in the lead (3 points) as I'm typing this, I'll throw something in here.

The introductory cs couse, ie the one I'm in right now, is not very good. I assume it gets a lot better, but the ones teaching those courses are not exactly on the cutting edge of what cs is at the moment. Case in point, my professor likes to speak great volumes of how important UML is and how programmers can spend months just designing the UML before they get to any coding.

That said, research here is pretty good. Jeff Han, one of the main multi-touch developers, worked at NYU. He gave a TED presentation as well: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jeff_han_demos_his_breakth...

Also, it's New York City, so you have a good chance of meeting all kinds of people, not just students and professors. Google's office is only about a 20 minute walk from campus.

Also, it's expensive, very expensive.

As an NYU CompSci major, I'll say that if you were going to choose a school entirely based on the quality of its CS department, NYU is not the way to go. First off, the department is small. Intro classes are offered every semester, though after even the first course, you end up with no flexibility in selection of times or instructors. Every Major-required course is offered every semester, so no worries there, but again, professor choice and classtime options are non-existant.

Moving on to the electives: The most popular electives are offered maybe every semester, as a single course, but it is much more common to see electives given only one slot every year. The less popular (either for teaching or for students themselves; I'm not sure) electives are offered as rarely as once every two years, and they include things such as Intro to Database Systems, Unix Tools, or other things that seem like they should be offered more frequently.

A plus is that you can take graduate level courses as electives, and there are quite a few interesting topics offered there. If you're looking to do web development, currently there is a Googler-taught course on Ruby on Rails, but little choice in the way of others such as Django or PHP. Actually, the CS department intentionally gimps some of the more interesting courses, reducing them to having zero value towards the completion of your major. (Web Development is an overview course that happens to be one of them.)

That said, NYC is an amazing place to be, and I don't think I'd want to be anywhere else, even given a better CS department. As well, you have the option of the Stern school of business, wherein you can take business classes, or potentially meet other NYU kids with ideas for startups, and business-side knowledge (though much more frequently you'll meet Sternies with ideas ripped off from other websites, and 0 ability to do anything productive for the site, who really just want to use you for grunt work programming their wonderful idea.)

Good luck with college applications, and may you end up with a wonderful department!

If you want to learn, then going to a Respected Research University is a waste of time and money. The quality of teaching at such places is often pathetically bad. Prestige comes from research, not teaching, and every dollar spent on research is a dollar not spent on teaching. You'll learn more for your money at a middling state school or private college, in part because these places attract professors who actually like to teach.

Predictable objections:

1. I had some great teachers at RRU: I did too. But they are the exception rather than the rule.

2. You'll make more money with a degree from RRU: The statistics don't support this. Harvard students end up with the same average income as students who get admitted to Harvard but then go to a less prestigious school.

3. You'll meet more smart people at RRU: Yes, but you can find smart people anywhere, and a few years of college classes is as good a filter as any admissions department, at least in technical majors. The kind of people you meet in a topology course is about the same no matter what school you're at.

I think the most important thing is to find a place where you'll fit in and be happy for 4-5 years. Visit a few places, and go with your gut.

Georgia Tech(Atlanta, Georgia) has a Computational Media program that might be what you are looking for.

GT's CS looks pretty good too. I'm a senior in HS and I'm applying there for CS with the same basic goal.

Tech has a college of computing, which I think will be nice (especially compared to being thrown in w/ engineering and having to do all those extra required classes). And they have "threads" where you specialize in 2 aspects of CS (and you do 1 thread if you do computational media), which is cool.

Apply to Carnegie Mellon. Do it :)

Seriously though, we're completely separate from the engineers, have a brand new building (The Gates-Hillman Center), and all the professors are working on cool stuff all the time. It's worth the application fee (if there is one?)

If you prefer a smaller school with a very high majority of tech related people (anywhere from CS to ECE to Robotics to Mech), you might like WPI. I can personally testify that the cs education is top notch (I've made a decent attempt to compare to other schools), and it's actually "Computer Science", not "learn java and c++". Almost all the professors are brilliant, and new experimental courses keep popping up every year. From the entrepreneurship point of view, the campus population is small, but a large proportion of people are tech oriented, and they know each other and work on things together, which helps a lot if you want to start up a company after school.

http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/Catalogs/Ugrad/Current/cscourses.htm...

If you google "WPI csxxxx", you'll probably hit course websites for current and past courses, which give some insight in the syllabus and assigned work.

EDIT: List of course websites:

http://www.cs.wpi.edu/Undergraduate/coursepages.html

You can also look into Canadian universities. U of Waterloo is a very entrepreneurial place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Waterloo#Spin-off...

If interested, you should also check out VeloCity, a dorm for entrepreneurs: http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/

They also have an MBET master's program that lets you incubate an idea over 11 months and you get student volunteers. It's right in their technology park next to the RIM (Blackberry) global HQ, OpenText, Google Canada, etc.

O and should mention McMaster's MEEI program which also is a master's program/incubator combo.

DISCLAIMER: Once you get it going, you are better off finding round 1 financing in the Valley than anywhere else, as far as I am told.

What is cost of attendance for an American student at a Canadian university these days? I get the impression that an applicant shopping for need-based financial aid offers (most applicants I know) has better chances of finding an affordable place at a United States private university, which is what seeded the list in my poll.

Canadian schools all post their tuition on their websites. Actually, Canadian schools are still cheaper than private, even if you are foreign. Waterloo Engineering Coop: $28,527.94/year Waterloo Math/Science Coop: About $20,000/year NOTE: You will for sure make most of that back with Waterloo's coop program. My friend worked at Google, VMware and others. Other top Canadian schools with lower international student tuition:

- UBC

- McGill

- McMaster

- Queens *(<- Heard this school is really, really tough)

Don't go here:

- U of Toronto: This is a very UN-entrepreneurial school. Good reputation but trust me, you don't want to go there. It is just too theoretical and math based. I don't mean like studying RSA. I mean like solving the proofs behind every mathematical element of RSA, and proofs are sometimes multiple choice. Really, really only for those with a serious love of theoretical mathematics.

The Seidenberg School of Computer Science at Pace University has a growing population of web-minded hackers and entrepreneurs. A few years ago Ivan Seidenberg(CEO Verizon) established a scholars program for top computer science students that provides nearly a full ride, free laptop, subsidized research projects, meetings with proven entrepreneurs, and internship opportunities.

Essentially if you are considering NYC and don't want to graduate with nearly 100k in loans(which is likely at NYU/Columbia), want small class sizes and a chance to work with a tight nit group of hackers Pace is a good bet.

http://www.pace.edu/seidenberg/

Details on scholarship: http://www.pace.edu/page.cfm?doc_id=25567

I go to Northwestern. The CS department is a little smaller than it might be at some other schools, but if you're looking to get a good background in a school close to Chicago, I'd recommend it. You'll meet a lot of different people with a lot of different interests. Also, having Chicago next door can't hurt. I have nothing bad to say about my degree/my professors (except one) at all. The classes are great and there are fewer students so it is very easy to talk to the professors.

As a side note, I know of at least one group of econ/math/cs students who are building a startup now. I'm not sure how smart it is to start it in the school year because the class schedule can be extremely rigorous, but to each his/her own.

P.S. I can't argue with the person pushing UIUC. They just won the ACM ICPC yesterday ;)

I went to Columbia and am a startup enthusiast. I had several close friends at school that were also starting or working at startups.

As much as I loved my time there, I'd have to say it's a pretty bad school for startups. MIT or Stanford are probably far better in terms of providing resources, a community, student support, etc.

The problem is that the administration is too busy to adopt new technologies, the engineering community is too tied into wall st, finance, consulting, etc., and the students are just sort of averse to supporting startups.

Fun fact though, CU Community, an early Facebook competitor, was actually building a strong following before Facebook even existed.

I think in an alternate universe I might have been happy at Berkeley. Good school with lots of computer history (BSD and Tcl just off the top of my head) and a good hacker area. I like the vibe there a bit more than Stanford, too, but that's just me.

I'm friends with a david w. who went to cal with me. whenever I see your posts, I think it's him.

Besides the obvious choices, here's what I've heard from my friends:

- UIUC has a pretty solid CS program, but it's cooold out there. - University of Michigan is solid too. - NYU isn't the best CS education, but the amazing location will open a lot of doors for you. - Columbia's CS program isn't that great. If you could get into Columbia, you might as well go to one of the top 5 CS programs instead. - My next door neighbor here at Berkeley went to Brown for his undergrad, and spoke highly of his education there.

Just my two cents :)

The University of Utah has an excellent CS program and a lot of CS history. Utah also has great state support so the program is cheaper meaning smaller student loans.

If we can include graduate programs, NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program is about as hacker as it gets. It's a multidisciplinary program that combines engineering, art, psychology, and sociology. Dodgeball (which was acquired by Google) began as a class project there.

I would argue that you should go to the most rigorous school with the smartest potential classmates across all fields.

From your list I'd go with Rice, though the differences in the end may really come down to personality and chance (room mates, friends, profs, etc).

* M.I.T. * Stanford * OSU (home of the Open Source Lab: http://osuosl.org/sites/osuosl.org/files/osl_datasheet.pdf)

Have yet to see anyone mention Duke or any of the public uni's in North Carolina... Research Triangle seems like an interesting hub, what's the general consensus there?

Are you limiting yourself to just US universities? If you're open to expand, try Cambridge Uni in the UK.

Cambridge University is certainly a wonderful university, and studying at a university in a different country from the country in which one grew up has additional educational advantages. But would a United States student be able to afford to study at Cambridge, if the main issue in shopping for local universities is cost?

Cambridge (where I did two degrees) has plenty of funding for non-UK and non-EU students.

It's less and harder to come by for undergrads, but postgrads of all nationalities have a very strong chance of being fully funded.

Don't get me wrong, it's still tough, but no tougher than what I understand the life of a postgrad in the US is :)

What about Cornell?

Universities are excellent for their library membership card, the rest is just very expensive icing.

I think you're forgetting the most important part of college: meeting smart people your age. Certainly possible to do elsewhere, but very easy at college

This is the primary advantage of the ivy league schools. If your goal is hacking, there isn't a lot that you'll learn at school that you wouldn't self study. Aside from meeting people, the primary advantage of college is providing an account of how you spent your time while you teach yourself software engineering.

Most any decent school for CS will have at least one student group that is very project oriented. It's not just a matter of meeting people, but rather meeting people who can help introduce you to new ideas and work on projects that are beyond the easy scope for a single person. Plus, if you're interested in anything hardware related they'll likely have better equipment available than a lone student is likely to.

That's a great argument for moving to a good college town, getting a decent job, and crashing the student group without enrolling. That's what jwz did at CMU, right?

Yes, but you could still meet interesting people your age without being 50k in the red.

In reality, the most interesting people you would like to meet are neither your age nor at your school (truth is, most are probably long dead; that's where the books come handy, to make the communication of knowledge timeless.)

And smart professors. I still talk with a lot of my undergrad profs on facebook ^-^.

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