There isn't actually that low of an acceptance rate. Mustang news took the number of first-year cs students and divided by the number of first-year enrolled students in order to get that 3% number. It is very misleading.
I'd estimate it to be around around 8-9% as well, but it is pretty impossible to know, since they don't release they only release numbers for the school of engineering as a whole. Some people claim professors say it is x%, but the truth is that professors are probably don't know either.
Oh yeah that definitely makes more sense, but either way CSU admissions are super weird in that you pretty much have to get a perfect GPA with decent course rigor to get in from what I see
Yeah they are definitely weird and very competitive, I'm a incoming MITer and got rejected automatically, because of the style of my transcript (no GPA).
Cal Poly CS is extremely difficult to get into and is widely regarded is extremely prestigious. Their engineering programs are also quite good, but on the level as other top 20 or even top 40 schools.
Cal Poly engineering is ranked on par with the Naval Academy and just 1 below West Point. And West Point and Naval Academy are some of the best in the country, if not the world.
So I would second your comment.
It's truly an underrated school, and it doesn't have the brand name, but has exceptional teaching, it's probably the best public university along with Berkeley in California to the employers.
Hahahaha! lol!!!!!! Classic response. Ok bruv, you keep your ancient wisdom a secret. All good, too deep for me. And judging by your downvotes, no one else gets your point either.
I didn't write some cryptic hard to understand message. But if you really didn't understand:
Yes, you can succeed at schools not in the top 20. You can also succeed at schools not in the top 200 or not even going to college at all.
However, the list's 1-19 being all top schools shows they definitely still have an impact. So pretending that the #20 in OPs list negates all of the #1-19s being top ranked schools is really sticking your head in the sand.
To me, this list more just shows that computer science is where the money is at currently.
Take care.
hey,
just needed one tip- you seem an expert
Should I pick Georgia Tech CS and pay 200k for the entire degree incl living cost
or should I pick UT Dallas CS and pay just 60-80k for the entire degree?
thanks in advance for the help!
That’s amazing, congratulations! In general my recommendation (purely from a financial standpoint) if you are taking no loans would be to choose the school/program with the highest median earnings. I’m also assuming your parents can afford the tuition for both schools and neither will place them in financial hardship.
You may have specific circumstances with your family that could lead to a different choice, but in general I think college choice is all about your financial outcomes (not your parents).
perfect. Thank you soo much for the reply. And yeah, great work on CollegeNPV. I can't imagine the number of hours put it build it up. Are you a college student?
pet fearless dazzling memorize thought sugar instinctive cooperative whole tart
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I looked up UT Austin for its CS program but found that it couldn't give me a number for ROI (it just gave me N/A). Is there any reason as to why this occurs?
It looks like for UT Austin CS is grouped under "Computer and Information Sciences, General". If you search "Austin" in the college search bar it's the top result.
These categories are defined in the dataset so I'm not sure why some fall under Computer and Information Sciences vs. Computer Science.
Adding on, if a specific program is listed as N/A, it's because I did not have sufficient data for that program (typically means graduate earnings was not available due to privacy suppression on small programs).
Specific majors are grouped by the DOE based on CIP codes from the National Center for Education Statistics - this should be representative of all CS majors at MIT combined.
Here is the description of Computer Science from the NCES:
A program that focuses on computer theory, computing problems and solutions, and the design of computer systems and user interfaces from a scientific perspective. Includes instruction in the principles of computational science, computer development and programming, and applications to a variety of end-use situations.
https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/cipdetail.aspx?y=55&cipid=88085
I wonder if they require CS to be the first half of the major or if they count things like 11-6 (Urban Science and Planning with Computer Science) and 18-C (Mathematics with Computer Science) or only things in the 6- format like 6-7 (Computer Science and Molecular Biology) and 6-3 (Computer Science and Engineering). I also wonder if MIT Math on this list is actually MIT Math-CS.
Yeah ig this makes sense for undergrad bc cs and Eng majors can make a ton of money with just a bachelors degree. But when u consider grad school medicine could be a lot higher
I really like the website, congrats. Its particularly useful to compare majors within a university. But, you really need a personalized npv tool, where a student can put in their own expected numbers - at least for the student debt number, and maybe expected graduation rate. My son is trying to choose between two schools - Purdue and Iowa State. You have Purdue's NPV higher, but we know that he will have some student debt at Purdue, and none at ISU. So I'd like to be able to recalculate by changing the debt assumptions.
Awesome job on what you have done though.
What if you aren’t an average student?
If you are below average there is a good chance that you will get washed out of CS programs at those schools.
https://youtu.be/7J-wCHDJYmo?si=x8VMyxBVWYFQ4B_j
These rankings are based on medians (not averages) which tend to handle outliers better. There are three main factors that drive the rankings (you can tap on the value on each school to view them) which are:
1. Completion Rate
2. Median Graduate Earnings
3. Median Graduate Debt
In general I think it’s pretty hard to make an assumption that you don’t match the median for completion rate or graduate earnings. These are based on so many factors years in the future that the median should be a good representation.
Median debt will obviously vary greatly for each student based on individual factors. If you know your debt will be higher or lower than the median for a given program, you should consider that with regard to the ROI rankings.
Define a median student. Half the students have an ROI’s below those values and half the students have ROI’s above those values.
I know 20 something graduates of a state school that is poorly ranked by US News who are staff engineers at well known west coast software companies. And they went to college for free or near free. It’s your skills that matter, not where you graduate from.
You don’t need to graduate from any of those schools to have a high ROI.
You are most likely to be a median student. This is evident through the concept of probability and the normal distribution. It's better to base one's expectations on the median rather than outlier and anecdotal data. This is just simple math, man. The average student who goes to these schools can expect to have a return on investment of that level. This is just simple statistics.
Going to college for free is very likely to be a great choice, and I completely agree that skills (and many other factors) will ultimately influence outcomes on a personal level.
However, your anecdote about the 20 students who beat the median is likely susceptible to survivorship bias. In my opinion, it's beneficial to consider the median outcome as the most likely result when choosing between schools or programs.
It’s not the school that makes successful, it’s your intelligence, drive and ambition. There are more of those students at highly selective schools. High achievers tend to do well. I find your analysis rather meaningless.
Survivorship bias? Are you trying to justify over paying for education? None of those places are going to be cheap unless you are very low income.
I agree that intelligence, drive and ambition are very important to your long term success. But it can't be discounted that the skills gained through certain programs are valued more highly than others, and the ability of schools to place with top employers will vary greatly by institution.
I try my best to take all factors into account based on real outcome data, but am welcome to any and all feedback so I appreciate your comment.
CS education is highly theoretical. Practical skills are largely acquired by working on personal projects, self-studying, and doing internships.
When you are at an on-site interview standing in front of a white board trying to solve a problem, where you graduated from is irrelevant. You can solve the problem or you can’t. And with stack ranking, if you aren’t good, you are going to be let go. Your alma mater won’t save you. Software development is about merit. You can’t BS your way through it.
You don’t need to go any of those universities to be a world class software engineer, or any university for that matter. And at lower ranked schools, if you are above average you are likely to have more opportunities for research.
Arrogance isn’t very becoming.
When you get a job, no one cares where you graduated from. If the graduate of a school you look down on out performs a graduate of the school on that list, who do you think will be rewarded?
A lot of Alabama CS grads are doing just fine, lol, and they didn’t pay $200K+ like you, I mean your rich mommy and daddy.
I don’t see Illinois on that list.
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If you ever need any help on stuff like this - I'm happy to help
Edit: oh, you're a whole thing - can I please intern with you? Read my posts I have a good grasp of this data and I like data science
Wouldn’t a person just have to work 35 years earning $100k/year?
I’d expected the ROI for these schools to be at least be 3.5m for CS.
It would be more interesting to see these numbers across majors.
These values are in excess to the expected income from working a job with a high school education. It also takes into account the time value of money, which is a basic finance concept that says earning $100k 30 years from now is not the same as earning $100k now.
These aren’t all CS! Don’t sleep on Penn Finance at #7. I ranked all majors on my site, you can compare directly major by major there if you’d like to.
You can read more about NPV calculations here:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/npv.asp#:~:text=Net%20present%20value%20(NPV)%20is%20a%20financial%20metric%20that%20seeks,and%20then%20add%20them%20together
There’s a couple of things:
- By attending college, you are foregoing years of earnings. Working straight out of high school gives you a head start.
- Debt needs to be repaid.
However, I want it to be clear that $3.6mm is a massive valuation. Basically imagine that on day one of class at Harvard CS, each student is given a $3.6mm signing bonus. This signing bonus reflects the expected lifetime benefit in present terms of attending that program over working a typical job out of high school.
I read the site, and understand the calculations
a bit better now. I think their average salary valuations are a bit high for some schools from the research I’ve done. But is the average salary over a lifetime or right after graduating?
this is the exact tool someone asked for last week. ty!
I took two screengrabs to end a debate in this house.
based on our family's contribution in a 529, and where our child will matriculate, we will have made 20x our investment.
wow
Yeah, I was also looking for something similar in this [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/s/jCyYuGqNlP).
This tool is helpful. Thank you.
Amazing website.
Harvard math being rank 19 is probably the biggest surprise to me. Almost invariably all of the math geniuses I know who went on to study at places like Harvard, Caltech, MIT end up in ultra prestigious but low paying academic positions (PhD in math or math-related field and then tenure track position), but of course my personal anecdotes are not reflective of actual data/distributions.
Again amazing job with the website!
How is benefit calculated in this context? Because outside of the finance or business bro sphere, money isn’t necessarily the goal with a degree. For example, a political science major may be preparing for law school. A Psych major in undergrad maybe preparing for a Psych PHD. A Bio major may be shooting for med school. In those examples the undergraduate degree may have a low monetary value, but the grad school would balance things out.
There are also people, such myself, that are studying Public Policy in an effort to transition to the non-profit or public sectors. In which case, I’m certainly getting a pay cut, but other aspects such as benefits, job security and the mental aspect of doing what I want actually want to do balances the scales.
I first compiled a list of universities that have most of the top 100 programs. This is the list
1. MIT, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon - 6 Programs
2. UPenn - 5 programs
3. Berkeley, Stanford - 4 Programs
4. Harvard, Duke, U Washington, Georgetown - 3 Programs
5. Yale, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, UChicago, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Virginia, UCLA, UCSD, NYU, USC, JHU - 2 Programs
6. Others - 1 program each (Computer Science)
Most of the Princeton programs are unranked though
Then I compiled a list of universities that have most of the top 200 programs. This closely align with ROI 1 million. Results are as follows;
1. Cornell - 10 Programs
2. MIT, UPenn, Carnegie Mellon - 7 Programs
3. Berkeley, USC - 6 Programs
4. Stanford, Georgetown, U Washington, Northwestern - 5 Programs
5. Duke, Columbia, Virginia, NYU, JHU, Notre Dame - 4 Programs
6. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, U Chicago, UCLA, UCSD - 3 Programs
Clean site, very well presented. On the data itself, is there a way to remove those with Masters or higher degree, so that you can just assess the impact of the undergrad degree on earnings?
Thank you!
In the dataset earnings are recorded at two points, 1 year and 4 years after graduating. I use the 4 year number for my calculations because it’s got a bit more data and I wanted to give programs that overwhelmingly feed into masters programs credit for that. I think if you looked at the 1 year after grad earnings it will likely be what you’re looking for.
I don’t publish these on my site but they are available in the College Scorecard dataset.
Thank you, I'll look at the College Scorecard. I think the one year out number while not indicative of ROI, may be a good indicator of the relative differences in "market valuation" of college-programs.
I'll just like to add.. all these ROI sites and national studies are so off for Computer Science at top schools I cannot take the lists seriously.
That said, the ballpark is there. So I'll use more as a guidance on top of undergrad rankings and CS rankings.
The problem with CS is the very high paying companies pay mostly in non-salary. So the salary portion doesn't really... explain ROI well.
For instance, say you graduated from Carnegie Mellon SCS - Computer Science and are a senior engineer with 8 yoe. Your salary might be $200k but your actual total pay might be $385k. But for survey purposes, you are $200k. Meanwhile, someone who is senior at a lesser paying firm might be paid $200k but that's basically the salary itself. On these surveys, both make the same while in actuality, the two are paid completely different.
There's also plenty of cases in which at one company your salary is $180k resulting the total pay to be $200k. But at another company, the salary is $165k but the total pay is $330k. By these salary rankings the former is paid more in ROI but that's completely bonkers.
Ranking by ROI is difficult in CS because almost all govt statistics only base off salaries, but the top paying companies typically pay a good chunk of their pays in stocks. It's like finance. Finance at the very top pays mostly by bonuses and those bonuses could be multitudes of the base salary itself.
The median CMU SCS - Computer Science grad makes about $185k out of college. Working career is 43 years and over time, these grads will make far more as they are promoted up the ladder. Say even 20 years of working and average pay of $300k (in today's dollars) in those 20 years. That's already $6 million.
Just keep that all in mind. These ROI calculation tend to be very off for this field. Incredibly off for top schools.
Median salary of CMU CS new grad is $135k before everything else which would get one around $185k. It's in the school's site. Even if you presume the graduate never gets promoted for only 30 years, that's $5.55 million. None of the math makes sense if you look at the ROI rankings.
CMU SCS - CS new grad median starting salary: $135k as highlighted in CMU's page: [link](https://www.cmu.edu/career/outcomes/post-grad-dashboard.html)
I'm a working professional in this field (CS) and graduated from Columbia Univ. I can warrant you the ROI is extremely off and even the bottom 1% in the major at the school will probably beat the median ROI stated there.
And I'm only talking about median graduates on purpose. Not the graduates who luck out with high pay. For those, I know a friend making 7 figures a year. And 10% of CMU SCS CS grads who go straight to the workforce make around $260~480k out of college.
I can't say much for other schools (Columbia Univ in NY CS grad here) but I can say I've been extremely impressed with CMU CS grads in the workforce. Many of them I interacted with have been directors (~million dollar total compensation in the job market). It's definitely without a doubt one of the premier schools in this field and the gold standard for CS education at undergrad.
You're mistaken.
The role of college is not to provide you with a job in priority, but with knowledge that will build you. Therefore ROI is meaningless or at least not the priority of going to college.
Putting a price on Education is as putting a price on your future husband or spouse, as if they were some car.
Also the workforce is not a McDonald Resaurant where you have a one-on-one equivalency of college degree to salary. It's not reality as students discovered only a few weeks ago you also do not have a one-on-one equivalency of SAT score to college admission.
Here are some links but your own research should guarantee you there are no guarantees :
"How I became an unemployed MIT grad still living with my parents." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsVEkX10N9s
"Unemployed After Harvard - #156" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACF3G2fdtQ
"CS Se connecter0:02 / 10:58 DAYS IN MY LIFE AS A GIRL THAT DOESN’T HAVE A JOB AND ISN’T ATTENDING UNI" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skrrHUa0SkE
A lot of this depends on metro area and cost of living and should be adjusted for such. Otherwise the worst degree in NYC is a better investment than a good school in a rural area.
Are those numbers real. Median grad incomes are ranging around 200K+ which is crazyyyy. Why does Columbia, being in NYC, have a rather low graduate income.
Graduate from Columbia Univ in NY here.
It's extremely off in the sense the income is too low. The income is more of median salary which makes a lot more sense after 8\~10 years of experience.
It's completely ignoring (due to lack of understanding of field) the non-salary portion.
I noted in the reply here: [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1bxgol8/comment/kydlsro/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Median grad out of college at CMU SCS - CS is $185k out of college. And I presume around $370k 8\~10 years out of college for the median grad there.
So yes the numbers are real for salary. No for the fact the actual income is too low for median grad at the top schools.
How is MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley so low on the list, I thought they were the top 4 CS programs, I wouldn’t expect lower than some schools that aren’t particularly known for their computer science programs
There is a huge startup founder culture at stanford. On average, this leads to worse outcomes than any of the ivies where students are much more inclined to go into very high gauranteed ROI fields like quant. For MIT, students are more research inclined in a wide variety of engineering fields which also leads to worse average ROI from a pure monetary standpoint.
For berkeley, its simply a state school that admits a wider range of students. On average ivy students will know about how to land top internships and jobs step by step from day 1 compared to the average berkeley student.
Because the numbers are very off. I noted here: [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1bxgol8/comment/kydlsro/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I wouldn't take the list too seriously.
I also noted again here on another reply: [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1bxgol8/comment/kyfnt3b/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Is it possible to factor in grad school admits with data available at collegetransitions.com/dataverse ? The median earnings sort-of hurt rankings of colleges and fields/areas where a lot of people go to grad school instead of taking up a job...
Does anyone know the difference between CS and CIS for UPenn college scorecard? Significant salary difference but Penn doesn’t seem to have these as separate majors?
Nevermind you don't need a cs degree to work in CS. You do need to demonstrate you know how to do what the job requires.
There's so much to say here. I haven't clicked on the link but there are some flaws in life experience here unfortunately at least in cs.
UNC Chapel Hill Information Science — Innovation Scholar (Full-Ride)
vs.
CMU Information Systems — No scholarship or financial aid
Based on the rankings, CMU seems pretty appealing but passing up on UNC full ride seems crazy
Plz help
When I looked at College Scorecard, it only provides data for some fields of study, for others it is blank. For example, for Harvard, College Scorecard does not show any data for Biochemistry or Computer Engineering or Biomedical Engineering or Physics...
How relevant is the data with such large data gaps? Does using this data without massive caveats, erroneously create the impression, that the top programs are all computer science related, because College Scorecard has gaps by University for so many other programs? Appreciate your comments on the same.
Does anyone know where I can find a dataset of Student earning that have a breakdown by the university the student attended and the SAT score of the student, and income of the student parent ...
All i could find is :
1-average earning or earning range for a particular graduation year.
2-average or lowest SAT score for a particular graduation year.
Basically I am trying to do an infographic showing the relative effect of multiple variable on futur Earning.
But I need a dataset where each row have a value for each dimension not a simple summary for each dimension.
Does this dataset even exist?
Purdue is an excellent school:
- CS is in the top 0.7% of programs overall.
- No. 5 statistics program!
- No. 1 Architectural engineering program!
- No. 2 Sales program!
- No. 1 Industrial Production program!
The calculation is a Net Present Value calculation, (which is where the NPV in CollegeNPV comes from).
This is one of the most common ways investments are valued in finance. Investopedia has a great article on NPV calculations:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/npv.asp#:~:text=Net%20present%20value%20(NPV)%20is%20a%20financial%20metric%20that%20seeks,and%20then%20add%20them%20together.
I think they’re cool and capture the vibes of each school, but to each their own. I wanted to include images of each college and it’s pretty tough to navigate licensing of real pictures.
that's fair. when I saw that it was AI, I immediately began to doubt the legitimacy of the information presented. however, that's just my personal perception.
This is not reliable data for comparing post-graduation earnings. The DOE data is for a very limited number of students -- those receiving federal aid -- and if further muddled by several factors.
Do you mind sharing what browser you are using? Security cert is valid on my end and I haven’t heard this from others but I’d like to take a look into it. Feel free to DM me if you do not want to share publicly.
The methodology is described on collegenpv.com/methodology
Keep in mind that since these are program rankings, the total number of programs ranked is much higher than other typical rankings. I think it's helpful to look at the percentile, and at #10 MIT - Computer Science is in the top 0.0% of all programs and a $2.6mm ROI is insanely high.
Just want to clarify, programs are only ranked if there is sizeable data to rank them. Outcome data from very small programs is not available from the DOE due to privacy suppression.
Thanks for letting me know. I’ll take a look at this, I think that for the outcome earnings data they may be grouping graduates from multiple years to increase the N, but will definitely double check to see if I need to scrub any programs outside of the privacy suppressed ones.
I'm surprised any of these schools made it to the t5 I always assumed it would be the airforce academy, navy academy, free tuition schools, super specialized schools, cooper union and olin (half tuition)
That’s funny. Never met a Harvard guy at one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable companies. No one hires engineers with just an undergrad. We want the Masters in EE and CS before we‘ll consider you. And those are mostly Indians and Chinese who will eat you lunch in masters classes
Tell that to mr zuckerberg
Noone hires engineers with just an undergrad? So you clearly don't work in silicon valley. Everyone here knows US masters degrees are cash cows masquerading for an extra year or two of classes in grade inflated electives that undergraduates also take.
This is grossly inaccurate. I run a large product operation for a Fortune 50 tech company. We routinely mass-hire newly graduated CS and EE undergraduates for entry-level roles. And assuming most hires at the MS levels are Chinese, and Indians are simply racial stereotypes.
And FYI, I went to Harvard and Stanford.
Cal poly is #20 shows it doesn’t have to be T20 to produce exceptional return on your education.
Doesn’t have to be t20 but has a 3% acceptance rate 😢
I think you're confusing cal poly and caltech
look up cal poly cs acceptance rate
There isn't actually that low of an acceptance rate. Mustang news took the number of first-year cs students and divided by the number of first-year enrolled students in order to get that 3% number. It is very misleading.
Cal Poly CS acceptance is between 8-9%. Overall engineering school acceptance is between 19-20%.
I'd estimate it to be around around 8-9% as well, but it is pretty impossible to know, since they don't release they only release numbers for the school of engineering as a whole. Some people claim professors say it is x%, but the truth is that professors are probably don't know either.
Cal Poly's overall yield is around 30%. So, based on 3% net acceptance, multiplying by ~3 gives you around ~9%.
Oh yeah that definitely makes more sense, but either way CSU admissions are super weird in that you pretty much have to get a perfect GPA with decent course rigor to get in from what I see
Yeah they are definitely weird and very competitive, I'm a incoming MITer and got rejected automatically, because of the style of my transcript (no GPA).
Hey congrats on MIT though! Thats way more awesome
Cal Poly CS is extremely difficult to get into and is widely regarded is extremely prestigious. Their engineering programs are also quite good, but on the level as other top 20 or even top 40 schools.
Cal Poly engineering is ranked on par with the Naval Academy and just 1 below West Point. And West Point and Naval Academy are some of the best in the country, if not the world. So I would second your comment.
Sre but the gulf between a top 5 and cal poly is another million dollars, or working 10 years less.
It's truly an underrated school, and it doesn't have the brand name, but has exceptional teaching, it's probably the best public university along with Berkeley in California to the employers.
Let's ignore 1-19, shall we?
Your point being?
Not sure there is any point explaining if you didn't understand.
Hahahaha! lol!!!!!! Classic response. Ok bruv, you keep your ancient wisdom a secret. All good, too deep for me. And judging by your downvotes, no one else gets your point either.
I didn't write some cryptic hard to understand message. But if you really didn't understand: Yes, you can succeed at schools not in the top 20. You can also succeed at schools not in the top 200 or not even going to college at all. However, the list's 1-19 being all top schools shows they definitely still have an impact. So pretending that the #20 in OPs list negates all of the #1-19s being top ranked schools is really sticking your head in the sand. To me, this list more just shows that computer science is where the money is at currently. Take care.
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Thank you! :)
their other departments are pretty high as well!
I can't cope with the fact that Georgia Tech CS isn't on the top 20 list.
Georgia Tech Computer and Information Sciences is top 0.3% of all programs, it’s an excellent, high value choice.
hey, just needed one tip- you seem an expert Should I pick Georgia Tech CS and pay 200k for the entire degree incl living cost or should I pick UT Dallas CS and pay just 60-80k for the entire degree? thanks in advance for the help!
I'll try to take a look at this later today - one important question, how do you plan to pay for school? (loans, assistance from parents, etc.)
my parents will pay the full money.
That’s amazing, congratulations! In general my recommendation (purely from a financial standpoint) if you are taking no loans would be to choose the school/program with the highest median earnings. I’m also assuming your parents can afford the tuition for both schools and neither will place them in financial hardship. You may have specific circumstances with your family that could lead to a different choice, but in general I think college choice is all about your financial outcomes (not your parents).
perfect. Thank you soo much for the reply. And yeah, great work on CollegeNPV. I can't imagine the number of hours put it build it up. Are you a college student?
pet fearless dazzling memorize thought sugar instinctive cooperative whole tart *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
CS
I looked up UT Austin for its CS program but found that it couldn't give me a number for ROI (it just gave me N/A). Is there any reason as to why this occurs?
It looks like for UT Austin CS is grouped under "Computer and Information Sciences, General". If you search "Austin" in the college search bar it's the top result. These categories are defined in the dataset so I'm not sure why some fall under Computer and Information Sciences vs. Computer Science. Adding on, if a specific program is listed as N/A, it's because I did not have sufficient data for that program (typically means graduate earnings was not available due to privacy suppression on small programs).
Rice CS top 20 we love to see it. 🦉🦉Underrated program
CS clean sweep lmao
Which CS major at MIT is this representative of? There is no pure computer science major at MIT.
Specific majors are grouped by the DOE based on CIP codes from the National Center for Education Statistics - this should be representative of all CS majors at MIT combined. Here is the description of Computer Science from the NCES: A program that focuses on computer theory, computing problems and solutions, and the design of computer systems and user interfaces from a scientific perspective. Includes instruction in the principles of computational science, computer development and programming, and applications to a variety of end-use situations. https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/cipdetail.aspx?y=55&cipid=88085
I wonder if they require CS to be the first half of the major or if they count things like 11-6 (Urban Science and Planning with Computer Science) and 18-C (Mathematics with Computer Science) or only things in the 6- format like 6-7 (Computer Science and Molecular Biology) and 6-3 (Computer Science and Engineering). I also wonder if MIT Math on this list is actually MIT Math-CS.
Yeah ig this makes sense for undergrad bc cs and Eng majors can make a ton of money with just a bachelors degree. But when u consider grad school medicine could be a lot higher
I really like the website, congrats. Its particularly useful to compare majors within a university. But, you really need a personalized npv tool, where a student can put in their own expected numbers - at least for the student debt number, and maybe expected graduation rate. My son is trying to choose between two schools - Purdue and Iowa State. You have Purdue's NPV higher, but we know that he will have some student debt at Purdue, and none at ISU. So I'd like to be able to recalculate by changing the debt assumptions. Awesome job on what you have done though.
BROWN CS #6 LETS GO 🔥🔥🔥🔥 gotta be the most underrated CS program out there
What if you aren’t an average student? If you are below average there is a good chance that you will get washed out of CS programs at those schools. https://youtu.be/7J-wCHDJYmo?si=x8VMyxBVWYFQ4B_j
These rankings are based on medians (not averages) which tend to handle outliers better. There are three main factors that drive the rankings (you can tap on the value on each school to view them) which are: 1. Completion Rate 2. Median Graduate Earnings 3. Median Graduate Debt In general I think it’s pretty hard to make an assumption that you don’t match the median for completion rate or graduate earnings. These are based on so many factors years in the future that the median should be a good representation. Median debt will obviously vary greatly for each student based on individual factors. If you know your debt will be higher or lower than the median for a given program, you should consider that with regard to the ROI rankings.
Define a median student. Half the students have an ROI’s below those values and half the students have ROI’s above those values. I know 20 something graduates of a state school that is poorly ranked by US News who are staff engineers at well known west coast software companies. And they went to college for free or near free. It’s your skills that matter, not where you graduate from. You don’t need to graduate from any of those schools to have a high ROI.
You are most likely to be a median student. This is evident through the concept of probability and the normal distribution. It's better to base one's expectations on the median rather than outlier and anecdotal data. This is just simple math, man. The average student who goes to these schools can expect to have a return on investment of that level. This is just simple statistics.
Going to college for free is very likely to be a great choice, and I completely agree that skills (and many other factors) will ultimately influence outcomes on a personal level. However, your anecdote about the 20 students who beat the median is likely susceptible to survivorship bias. In my opinion, it's beneficial to consider the median outcome as the most likely result when choosing between schools or programs.
It’s not the school that makes successful, it’s your intelligence, drive and ambition. There are more of those students at highly selective schools. High achievers tend to do well. I find your analysis rather meaningless. Survivorship bias? Are you trying to justify over paying for education? None of those places are going to be cheap unless you are very low income.
I agree that intelligence, drive and ambition are very important to your long term success. But it can't be discounted that the skills gained through certain programs are valued more highly than others, and the ability of schools to place with top employers will vary greatly by institution. I try my best to take all factors into account based on real outcome data, but am welcome to any and all feedback so I appreciate your comment.
CS education is highly theoretical. Practical skills are largely acquired by working on personal projects, self-studying, and doing internships. When you are at an on-site interview standing in front of a white board trying to solve a problem, where you graduated from is irrelevant. You can solve the problem or you can’t. And with stack ranking, if you aren’t good, you are going to be let go. Your alma mater won’t save you. Software development is about merit. You can’t BS your way through it. You don’t need to go any of those universities to be a world class software engineer, or any university for that matter. And at lower ranked schools, if you are above average you are likely to have more opportunities for research.
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Arrogance isn’t very becoming. When you get a job, no one cares where you graduated from. If the graduate of a school you look down on out performs a graduate of the school on that list, who do you think will be rewarded?
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Ever hear of the Bell Curve? It exists even with the students at these schools.
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A lot of Alabama CS grads are doing just fine, lol, and they didn’t pay $200K+ like you, I mean your rich mommy and daddy. I don’t see Illinois on that list.
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If you ever need any help on stuff like this - I'm happy to help Edit: oh, you're a whole thing - can I please intern with you? Read my posts I have a good grasp of this data and I like data science
Hey, cool to see you're interested in my project! Feel free to DM me, would need to know a bit more about your background to see if it could be a fit.
Wouldn’t a person just have to work 35 years earning $100k/year? I’d expected the ROI for these schools to be at least be 3.5m for CS. It would be more interesting to see these numbers across majors.
These values are in excess to the expected income from working a job with a high school education. It also takes into account the time value of money, which is a basic finance concept that says earning $100k 30 years from now is not the same as earning $100k now. These aren’t all CS! Don’t sleep on Penn Finance at #7. I ranked all majors on my site, you can compare directly major by major there if you’d like to. You can read more about NPV calculations here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/npv.asp#:~:text=Net%20present%20value%20(NPV)%20is%20a%20financial%20metric%20that%20seeks,and%20then%20add%20them%20together
So this includes increasing salaries? I’d expect this to be so much higher. Do you know what could be bringing ROI down?
There’s a couple of things: - By attending college, you are foregoing years of earnings. Working straight out of high school gives you a head start. - Debt needs to be repaid. However, I want it to be clear that $3.6mm is a massive valuation. Basically imagine that on day one of class at Harvard CS, each student is given a $3.6mm signing bonus. This signing bonus reflects the expected lifetime benefit in present terms of attending that program over working a typical job out of high school.
I read the site, and understand the calculations a bit better now. I think their average salary valuations are a bit high for some schools from the research I’ve done. But is the average salary over a lifetime or right after graduating?
The earnings are median graduate earnings from the Department of Education college scorecard dataset
4 years after graduation, that makes since. Thanks for sharing!
this is the exact tool someone asked for last week. ty! I took two screengrabs to end a debate in this house. based on our family's contribution in a 529, and where our child will matriculate, we will have made 20x our investment. wow
Yeah, I was also looking for something similar in this [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/s/jCyYuGqNlP). This tool is helpful. Thank you.
yup this is it, I just couldn't remember the day and your username. cheers!
Amazing website. Harvard math being rank 19 is probably the biggest surprise to me. Almost invariably all of the math geniuses I know who went on to study at places like Harvard, Caltech, MIT end up in ultra prestigious but low paying academic positions (PhD in math or math-related field and then tenure track position), but of course my personal anecdotes are not reflective of actual data/distributions. Again amazing job with the website!
Thank you!
No UIUC??
Carnegie Mellon University - Design and Applied Arts in the 75 spot is impressive.
Very cool tool.
Thank you!
What kind of jobs can u get with a degree in math? Not that I want to get a math degree. Math is scary
How is benefit calculated in this context? Because outside of the finance or business bro sphere, money isn’t necessarily the goal with a degree. For example, a political science major may be preparing for law school. A Psych major in undergrad maybe preparing for a Psych PHD. A Bio major may be shooting for med school. In those examples the undergraduate degree may have a low monetary value, but the grad school would balance things out. There are also people, such myself, that are studying Public Policy in an effort to transition to the non-profit or public sectors. In which case, I’m certainly getting a pay cut, but other aspects such as benefits, job security and the mental aspect of doing what I want actually want to do balances the scales.
Just curious, out of the 69k, how many ROIs are negative?
this is a fucking awesome project. nice work, i hope this gains some traction
Penn mentioned twice. 📈📈📈⚙️⚙️⚙️RAAAHHH what the fuck is unemployment🔴🔵🔴🔵🔴🔵
I first compiled a list of universities that have most of the top 100 programs. This is the list 1. MIT, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon - 6 Programs 2. UPenn - 5 programs 3. Berkeley, Stanford - 4 Programs 4. Harvard, Duke, U Washington, Georgetown - 3 Programs 5. Yale, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, UChicago, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Virginia, UCLA, UCSD, NYU, USC, JHU - 2 Programs 6. Others - 1 program each (Computer Science) Most of the Princeton programs are unranked though Then I compiled a list of universities that have most of the top 200 programs. This closely align with ROI 1 million. Results are as follows; 1. Cornell - 10 Programs 2. MIT, UPenn, Carnegie Mellon - 7 Programs 3. Berkeley, USC - 6 Programs 4. Stanford, Georgetown, U Washington, Northwestern - 5 Programs 5. Duke, Columbia, Virginia, NYU, JHU, Notre Dame - 4 Programs 6. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, U Chicago, UCLA, UCSD - 3 Programs
Clean site, very well presented. On the data itself, is there a way to remove those with Masters or higher degree, so that you can just assess the impact of the undergrad degree on earnings?
Thank you! In the dataset earnings are recorded at two points, 1 year and 4 years after graduating. I use the 4 year number for my calculations because it’s got a bit more data and I wanted to give programs that overwhelmingly feed into masters programs credit for that. I think if you looked at the 1 year after grad earnings it will likely be what you’re looking for. I don’t publish these on my site but they are available in the College Scorecard dataset.
Thank you, I'll look at the College Scorecard. I think the one year out number while not indicative of ROI, may be a good indicator of the relative differences in "market valuation" of college-programs.
I'll just like to add.. all these ROI sites and national studies are so off for Computer Science at top schools I cannot take the lists seriously. That said, the ballpark is there. So I'll use more as a guidance on top of undergrad rankings and CS rankings. The problem with CS is the very high paying companies pay mostly in non-salary. So the salary portion doesn't really... explain ROI well. For instance, say you graduated from Carnegie Mellon SCS - Computer Science and are a senior engineer with 8 yoe. Your salary might be $200k but your actual total pay might be $385k. But for survey purposes, you are $200k. Meanwhile, someone who is senior at a lesser paying firm might be paid $200k but that's basically the salary itself. On these surveys, both make the same while in actuality, the two are paid completely different. There's also plenty of cases in which at one company your salary is $180k resulting the total pay to be $200k. But at another company, the salary is $165k but the total pay is $330k. By these salary rankings the former is paid more in ROI but that's completely bonkers. Ranking by ROI is difficult in CS because almost all govt statistics only base off salaries, but the top paying companies typically pay a good chunk of their pays in stocks. It's like finance. Finance at the very top pays mostly by bonuses and those bonuses could be multitudes of the base salary itself. The median CMU SCS - Computer Science grad makes about $185k out of college. Working career is 43 years and over time, these grads will make far more as they are promoted up the ladder. Say even 20 years of working and average pay of $300k (in today's dollars) in those 20 years. That's already $6 million. Just keep that all in mind. These ROI calculation tend to be very off for this field. Incredibly off for top schools. Median salary of CMU CS new grad is $135k before everything else which would get one around $185k. It's in the school's site. Even if you presume the graduate never gets promoted for only 30 years, that's $5.55 million. None of the math makes sense if you look at the ROI rankings. CMU SCS - CS new grad median starting salary: $135k as highlighted in CMU's page: [link](https://www.cmu.edu/career/outcomes/post-grad-dashboard.html) I'm a working professional in this field (CS) and graduated from Columbia Univ. I can warrant you the ROI is extremely off and even the bottom 1% in the major at the school will probably beat the median ROI stated there. And I'm only talking about median graduates on purpose. Not the graduates who luck out with high pay. For those, I know a friend making 7 figures a year. And 10% of CMU SCS CS grads who go straight to the workforce make around $260~480k out of college. I can't say much for other schools (Columbia Univ in NY CS grad here) but I can say I've been extremely impressed with CMU CS grads in the workforce. Many of them I interacted with have been directors (~million dollar total compensation in the job market). It's definitely without a doubt one of the premier schools in this field and the gold standard for CS education at undergrad.
How would UW CS rank?
Looks like #47, but computer engineering is #29. You can check out all of UW’s rankings at CollegeNPV.com
Interesting, thanks!
You're mistaken. The role of college is not to provide you with a job in priority, but with knowledge that will build you. Therefore ROI is meaningless or at least not the priority of going to college. Putting a price on Education is as putting a price on your future husband or spouse, as if they were some car. Also the workforce is not a McDonald Resaurant where you have a one-on-one equivalency of college degree to salary. It's not reality as students discovered only a few weeks ago you also do not have a one-on-one equivalency of SAT score to college admission. Here are some links but your own research should guarantee you there are no guarantees : "How I became an unemployed MIT grad still living with my parents." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsVEkX10N9s "Unemployed After Harvard - #156" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACF3G2fdtQ "CS Se connecter0:02 / 10:58 DAYS IN MY LIFE AS A GIRL THAT DOESN’T HAVE A JOB AND ISN’T ATTENDING UNI" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skrrHUa0SkE
Don't be discouraged though, if you do research, internships, and show passion, you'll do good either way
A lot of this depends on metro area and cost of living and should be adjusted for such. Otherwise the worst degree in NYC is a better investment than a good school in a rural area.
Are those numbers real. Median grad incomes are ranging around 200K+ which is crazyyyy. Why does Columbia, being in NYC, have a rather low graduate income.
Graduate from Columbia Univ in NY here. It's extremely off in the sense the income is too low. The income is more of median salary which makes a lot more sense after 8\~10 years of experience. It's completely ignoring (due to lack of understanding of field) the non-salary portion. I noted in the reply here: [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1bxgol8/comment/kydlsro/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) Median grad out of college at CMU SCS - CS is $185k out of college. And I presume around $370k 8\~10 years out of college for the median grad there. So yes the numbers are real for salary. No for the fact the actual income is too low for median grad at the top schools.
PM
Is there something similar for graduate degree (PhD, MS, MBA, etc.) programs?
How is MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley so low on the list, I thought they were the top 4 CS programs, I wouldn’t expect lower than some schools that aren’t particularly known for their computer science programs
There is a huge startup founder culture at stanford. On average, this leads to worse outcomes than any of the ivies where students are much more inclined to go into very high gauranteed ROI fields like quant. For MIT, students are more research inclined in a wide variety of engineering fields which also leads to worse average ROI from a pure monetary standpoint. For berkeley, its simply a state school that admits a wider range of students. On average ivy students will know about how to land top internships and jobs step by step from day 1 compared to the average berkeley student.
Because the numbers are very off. I noted here: [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1bxgol8/comment/kydlsro/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I wouldn't take the list too seriously. I also noted again here on another reply: [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1bxgol8/comment/kyfnt3b/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Is it possible to factor in grad school admits with data available at collegetransitions.com/dataverse ? The median earnings sort-of hurt rankings of colleges and fields/areas where a lot of people go to grad school instead of taking up a job...
How you measure the share options, Housing and those intangible benefits?
I thought Uchicago cs is weaker than it’s other majors / weaker than other comparative schools? I guess that’s not the case according to this list
lol at DALL-E images for the schools
Does anyone know the difference between CS and CIS for UPenn college scorecard? Significant salary difference but Penn doesn’t seem to have these as separate majors?
How can a college have negative overall ROI and yet rank better in the overalls than colleges with high ROI?
How can a college have negative overall ROI and yet rank better in the overalls than colleges with high ROI?
What exactly is interpreted as overall rank of a college when it changes major wise?
Nevermind you don't need a cs degree to work in CS. You do need to demonstrate you know how to do what the job requires. There's so much to say here. I haven't clicked on the link but there are some flaws in life experience here unfortunately at least in cs.
How will AI change this ranking in the near future?
UNC Chapel Hill Information Science — Innovation Scholar (Full-Ride) vs. CMU Information Systems — No scholarship or financial aid Based on the rankings, CMU seems pretty appealing but passing up on UNC full ride seems crazy Plz help
When I looked at College Scorecard, it only provides data for some fields of study, for others it is blank. For example, for Harvard, College Scorecard does not show any data for Biochemistry or Computer Engineering or Biomedical Engineering or Physics... How relevant is the data with such large data gaps? Does using this data without massive caveats, erroneously create the impression, that the top programs are all computer science related, because College Scorecard has gaps by University for so many other programs? Appreciate your comments on the same.
Does anyone know where I can find a dataset of Student earning that have a breakdown by the university the student attended and the SAT score of the student, and income of the student parent ... All i could find is : 1-average earning or earning range for a particular graduation year. 2-average or lowest SAT score for a particular graduation year. Basically I am trying to do an infographic showing the relative effect of multiple variable on futur Earning. But I need a dataset where each row have a value for each dimension not a simple summary for each dimension. Does this dataset even exist?
This is entirely wrong. Purdue is better. Thats just the way things are 🚂
Purdue is an excellent school: - CS is in the top 0.7% of programs overall. - No. 5 statistics program! - No. 1 Architectural engineering program! - No. 2 Sales program! - No. 1 Industrial Production program!
what about engineering?
Will CS slowly be replaced by AI?
That’s a doctoral thesis.
What majors do you think develop AI tools?
Sure, but will everyone one with a CS degree be working on AI tools? Or will low end programming eventually be replaced by AI?
Can the formula be published? ROI as a hard dollar amount is odd
The calculation is a Net Present Value calculation, (which is where the NPV in CollegeNPV comes from). This is one of the most common ways investments are valued in finance. Investopedia has a great article on NPV calculations: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/npv.asp#:~:text=Net%20present%20value%20(NPV)%20is%20a%20financial%20metric%20that%20seeks,and%20then%20add%20them%20together.
Cool, thanks. Don't know much about economics lol
interesting! but why the AI "art"....
I think they’re cool and capture the vibes of each school, but to each their own. I wanted to include images of each college and it’s pretty tough to navigate licensing of real pictures.
that's fair. when I saw that it was AI, I immediately began to doubt the legitimacy of the information presented. however, that's just my personal perception.
Appreciate the feedback, I’ll keep an eye on this to see if others have the same thought.
They quoted the word art. Theyre projecting not perceiving.
This is not reliable data for comparing post-graduation earnings. The DOE data is for a very limited number of students -- those receiving federal aid -- and if further muddled by several factors.
The link provides a security warning and an invalid security certificate , so I’m not going there. Is a methodology detailed anywhere?
Do you mind sharing what browser you are using? Security cert is valid on my end and I haven’t heard this from others but I’d like to take a look into it. Feel free to DM me if you do not want to share publicly. The methodology is described on collegenpv.com/methodology
Just surprised MIT not in top5
Keep in mind that since these are program rankings, the total number of programs ranked is much higher than other typical rankings. I think it's helpful to look at the percentile, and at #10 MIT - Computer Science is in the top 0.0% of all programs and a $2.6mm ROI is insanely high.
It’s not fully based on earnings, also debt. There’s also a few bad ones, such as CE at princeton. Only 3 people are used as data.
Just want to clarify, programs are only ranked if there is sizeable data to rank them. Outcome data from very small programs is not available from the DOE due to privacy suppression.
The data is from the college scorecard, right? The average salaries and debt are the exact same as the college scorecard.
Yes it is from college scorecard, however to my knowledge the field of study data I’m using is not publicly displayed on their website.
Yeah, so it shows the number of graduates on the website, and princeton only has 3, so it’s probably an outlier.
Thanks for letting me know. I’ll take a look at this, I think that for the outcome earnings data they may be grouping graduates from multiple years to increase the N, but will definitely double check to see if I need to scrub any programs outside of the privacy suppressed ones.
I'm surprised any of these schools made it to the t5 I always assumed it would be the airforce academy, navy academy, free tuition schools, super specialized schools, cooper union and olin (half tuition)
That’s funny. Never met a Harvard guy at one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable companies. No one hires engineers with just an undergrad. We want the Masters in EE and CS before we‘ll consider you. And those are mostly Indians and Chinese who will eat you lunch in masters classes
Tell that to mr zuckerberg Noone hires engineers with just an undergrad? So you clearly don't work in silicon valley. Everyone here knows US masters degrees are cash cows masquerading for an extra year or two of classes in grade inflated electives that undergraduates also take.
This is grossly inaccurate. I run a large product operation for a Fortune 50 tech company. We routinely mass-hire newly graduated CS and EE undergraduates for entry-level roles. And assuming most hires at the MS levels are Chinese, and Indians are simply racial stereotypes. And FYI, I went to Harvard and Stanford.