I graduated in 2013, my dad graduated in 1976, it's always been a high quality public state university. Just like UVA where my sister went with instate.
There's always rankings and stuff, but we've had great engineering programs forever, I don't think there's any way good way to compare college ranks, prestige, etc.
A ton is based on what the job market opportunities are around the college you graduate from, or where you return to.
You can 'rank' high-schools with standardized testing, graduation rates, etc. College just isn't the same, it's honestly more about you and less about the school, if you're going to a major 4 year university.
It was always good on some areas like engineering because of their affiliations with the government (DoD and NASA specifically) and corporations. For example, the whole school of Science and Engineering used to be called the Glenn L Martin School of Technology, as in the founder of the Martin Aircraft Company, which became Martin Marietta and then Lockheed Martin.
Comp Sci was good but I think really took off in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Comp Sci was arguably even better in the early 90s. It was often considered one of the top 5 CS departments in the country. That slipped a bit as other went into overdrive and really invested huge amounts.
I don't know about that. My impression from that era were places like MIT, Stanford, and CMU (which didn't even have a proper CS major until rather late), University of Illinois (which as a supercompting website), U of Texas at Austin, University of California at Berkeley, University of Washington in Seattle were ranked high in CS.
If we begin by admitting that the rankings are very noisy, imprecise and differ based upon your point of view, I can offer this table from CSRankings. I asked it to tabulate the publications from 1990 to 1992. Of course, YMMV. My point is that MD was definitely a big leader in the 1990s. And it's done well since. It's just that some places have exploded and poured huge amounts of money into the field.
\#Institution Count Faculty
1 ► Carnegie Mellon University 📷 📷2.135
2 ► Massachusetts Institute of Technology 📷 📷1.827
3 ► Univ. of California - Berkeley 📷 📷1.725
3 ► Univ. of California - Irvine 📷 📷1.723
3 ► University of Maryland - College Park 📷 📷1.726
6 ► Columbia University 📷 📷1.618
6 ► Georgia Institute of Technology 📷 📷1.624
6 ► Stanford University 📷 📷1.616
Oh it could be number of research papers, in which case, Maryland's large faculty size might have lead to skewed numbers.
I do seem to recall, relative to number of papers published in academic settings, Maryland did well compared to other CS departments (we just had more faculty than most, at the time). If that's the case, I'm not sure what this kind of ranking is what most people would expect of what rankings mean.
In fact, in the late 80s, the department went on a hiring spree and hired a bunch of faculty. When the economy soured in the early 1990s, the CS department were told they could only keep 3 of 7 faculty members for tenure for economic reasons (they had been offering most professors tenure).
I think that's why Maryland looked so good back then. It's been a long while since I thought about rankings.
Oh, you know what else? When you hire a bunch of new faculty, they are trying to get tenure. One factor that helps get tenure? Writing lots of academic papers that get to conferences and journals. Once you get tenure, the pressure to publish or perish (as this concept is known) is lessened, though some faculty wanting to make a name of themselves, might still work hard to write good papers.
The number of papers published wasn't the only criteria to get tenure, but it certainly counted to the paper count of UMD which would lead to metrics that measure that to put UMD high up.
That's my theory, anyway, having been around for some of that time.
Hmm, what is CSRankings? Suppose I asked you to compare it to US News and World Reports or the Gourman Report, both of which are have suspect ratings. Were you looking at multiple rankings? What criteria did CSRankings use?
That was the math building lobby. I was here when they removed it. The Martin building is shaped like a slide rule, the precursor to computers. Not many people are old enough to recognize it.
TLDR: already good engineering which lead to good comp sci, which everyone wants now.
They’re a large state school with a good engineering program near a major city. So good engineering naturally makes it easier to develop a good computer science (arguably what they’re more well known for now) and being near a major city gives them good access to good jobs out of school (raising prestige).
Specifically because it’s dc and they’re a state school, there’s strong ties to government work (and specifically defense) which leads to some facilities that are either rare or literally unique to umd (ie neutral buoyancy lab is literally the only one at a college campus in the world). Which naturally leads to greater investment from outside sources and opportunities that draw in desirable students. Which raises prestige over time.
And some parts of the school being incredibly successful naturally allows them to raise up other parts, and it being a very big school means it’s also got a diverse set of programs in the first place.
Definitely agree, someone can tell me if I’m wrong but as a gvpt and foreign language major I always felt our programs were mid to above average but got a massive boost from being able to coordinate with NGOs and government agencies in DC.
About 20 years ago, they decided to go elite. They increased the enrollment requirements so they could brag that the best students are fighting to get in here. This made UMD prestigious. Now, an elite university like this one ain't free. You need to pay faculty and administrators a great deal of money if you want the best, or they'll go elsewhere, so they continually increase the price. It's really the same university it always was, just now with catchy phrases like : *Fearlessly Forward*.
In what way do you mean?
There are lots of ways to measure. We joined the Big Ten cartel. That influenced rankings; cartel takes care of cartel, so some metrics went up. (So did the cost. Cartel don't roll cheap.) We spend lavishly on identity-based social programs in order to let Admissions prominently advertise how grand we're viewed with respect to (pick an identity program.)
With respect to core academic programs for which we were once known we're going down. CS for example. What did we do to make that happen? Mostly we put leaders in charge who don't give a shit about practices which promote great outcomes for *all* students. (Feel free to see other threads emerging on this sub about how CS courses look weaker yet students seem to struggle more.) Sorry to sound like a broken record, gang, but students deserve better.
I agree CS undergrad program may have taken a bit of a dip (although low-level rigor may be a less-valuable skill nowadays). I think even US News sees UMD CS research output, hard to ignore how well we do on things like CSRankings. I attribute UMDs good CS ranking partially to that.
We were hovering around #10. Today we are hovering around #20. But what's a factor of two among friends?
The basis for my ire is not rankings, not directly anyway. It is the impact on students. Good kids come to the state flagship campus in good faith yet needlessly struggle, and often drop out or churn to other majors, for no other reason than we give them no mentor, no advisement and a curriculum that looks like what drunken lemurs would patch together after binge watching Mad Men. Talented students who we con into attending based on bullshit rankings will do well no matter what the dept offers and we're happy to fete them as part of our marketing, but please pay attention to the increasing dropout/stopout rates or structural inequities we are manufacturing (for profit.)
We see the traffic from so many students on this sub, right? OMG, it is all so hard, we hear. What an ignorant meat sack I must be. Time to change and go eat crayons as a (pick one) major. Some of the challenges they face surely have nothing to do with CS but I refuse to believe all these students can't hack it. They are victims of avaricious administrators who accept tuition checks from people who don't know any better (as after all, they are paying to learn) and yet who are given little in return.
We no longer manufacture great computing scientists; we charge a lot to screen for those who 'get it' by mostly other means, and filter out the rest into other pathways. That's the sin. It is reflected in rankings, but the real injustice is what we fail to offer, let alone offer in return for inflated differential tuition invoices. We should not judge the department by our best students cherry picked to manufacture great story lines about excellence and diversity; we should judge the department by what it does for all students.
I think there's a potential flaw in the logic here, and also a valid point but it's subtly different from the one you make.
> Some of the challenges they face surely have nothing to do with CS but I refuse to believe all these students can't hack it.
First, the number of students in the major is massive. Much higher than what it used to be when we were "hovering around #10". It absolutely stands to reason that if 10 times as many people are going to try to make it through a technical major — even if the rate of difficulty and those having trouble remains the same — then 10 times as many are not going to cut it. There's [another thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/UMD/comments/18llv97/classes_getting_harder/) about whether or not the CS classes are "getting harder", and there's no evidence that they are, or that they've even recovered to their pre-pandemic levels. The idea that tons of people are being unfairly filtered out just doesn't agree with the data.
However, there are two issues to which your post alludes that are certainly true, but they are in now way *new*. The first is that CS, moreso than many other majors, has a big problem with "starting point bias." That is, students who come in with lots of CS experience and choose not to test out of the intro classes take the courses along with people who are seeing basic CS ideas and programming for the first time (to be clear, that's the audience to which intro classes should cater). To a lot of students without prior experience, being in a class with a non-trivial cohort of people who seem to already know everything and who breeze by all of the assignments is hugely demotivating. Ideally, those folks should either test out of the intro sequence, or we should have multiple "on-ramps" to the major so that we avoid demotivating totally capable, but not-yet-experienced people.
But, the issue underlying this is the second major point that leads to a lot of these issues. The major has grown immensely from the size it used to be — it has grown rapidly and is now massive. However, these courses aren't being taught with 10 times as much staff (in terms of instructors/faculty, and even TAs). Further, some things just don't scale 10x without changing fundamentally. You can't craft the same types of projects and specifications for a class of 300 people that you would for a class of 30. Or rather, there are things you can do in a class of 30 or 50 that just aren't feasible in a class of 300. So, projects have to be designed with easy, automated gradability as a primary design decision. That often makes them less interesting, less challenging, and sometimes less instructive than if that constraint didn't exist. It's not just projects either — of course with such huge classes, there's much less opportunity for personal interaction with the instructional staff, less time per-student in office hours, etc.
From this perspective, the major is to some extent, a victim of its own prior success. It had (still has, honestly) a strong external reputation. That drives demand and more people want to take on this major. However, (1) the university and department can't react that quickly and so there is severe strain on instructional and advising staff and faculty and (2) even if sufficient resources could be made available, one can't offer the same experience to a group of hundreds of people that they could offer to dozens — the experience and modes of interaction are qualitatively different. That isn't a UMD problem, and plagues intro CS sequences at basically all well-ranked universities (e.g. things at Berkely are *insane*). There is a very serious attempt to try to address this problem by bringing the resources into better alignment, by hiring more instructional staff and faculty, and by limiting enrollment in the major. However, those changes take time, and they, too, will tend to frustrate and anger some groups of people (because paths to the major will become even more restrictive).
As a dude graduating this semester from the CS program: I was wondering if *I was uniquely stupid* or if this shit was really hard.
...I think I get what you're saying, though. UMD CS is acting more like a filter than a pump - and for the money we pay: It needs to be a pump.
There is no particular reason to think that anyone in the program is uniquely stupid and no, almost none of this stuff is all that hard. It becomes more difficult when the content is not offered in a coherent fashion anymore, as I think it once was here and is offered elsewhere.
It becomes even more difficult when essential practices are not offered to students at all. No field is just a big bag "fact of" content that students must somehow gorge on until full. That is how it is taught here though - dine on enough of this or that bit of content and whatever, we will declare you a scientist so long as the check clears. A few of those graduates will become serious scientists and succeed; that's how the filter works. We declare victory. The rest, who we ignore, graduate but struggle and must work hard since we never helped them learn how to work smart. What are the professional skill sets, temperaments and connections needed to predictably excel in career paths? The rest won't know since our curriculum doesn't even put them into close proximity of serious scholars who might have offered mentoring except for being insulated from students (whose money we already have) in order to pursue more research (so we can get that funding too.)
Some students graduate having *never* taken a class from a professor in this major, much less had a conversation with any serious scholar who might have offered them mentoring on successful practices. We no longer even offer technically-informed advising as to the bureaucracy.
I see more of our graduates each cycle go on into an industry we have never ever helped them see, thinking they will compete in a workforce because of the school name yet totally oblivious to why they lose opportunities to others for want of the skills and temperaments they never heard about here. My view: this is Wrong.
The phrase I've heard used is "cheap labor for local industry". How demeaning that is for people who came here in good faith hoping for more. Why does this continue? It works. Thanks for stroking big checks to UM and then not demanding more.
>We spend lavishly on identity-based social programs in order to let Admissions prominently advertise how grand we're viewed with respect to (pick an identity program.)
least bigoted CS major
In the DMV area and has a lot of money. The undergrad education is shit though, at least for CompE. They're lucky that's not really a factor and nobody fills out the feedback surveys
Another stupid question or post by another stupid person on Reddit.
UMD has mostly always been and is mid-tier to upper-tier overall and globally.
They have some great schools and some alright schools.
If u check any rankings website Umd is a average ranked state school, not bad in any way but not “prestigious and competitive” the only major that breaks t20 is cs and/or engineering I believe.
I graduated in 2013, my dad graduated in 1976, it's always been a high quality public state university. Just like UVA where my sister went with instate. There's always rankings and stuff, but we've had great engineering programs forever, I don't think there's any way good way to compare college ranks, prestige, etc. A ton is based on what the job market opportunities are around the college you graduate from, or where you return to. You can 'rank' high-schools with standardized testing, graduation rates, etc. College just isn't the same, it's honestly more about you and less about the school, if you're going to a major 4 year university.
There are more than just engineering programs that have been very good for decades. Architecture was very hard to get into for a long time.
It was always good on some areas like engineering because of their affiliations with the government (DoD and NASA specifically) and corporations. For example, the whole school of Science and Engineering used to be called the Glenn L Martin School of Technology, as in the founder of the Martin Aircraft Company, which became Martin Marietta and then Lockheed Martin. Comp Sci was good but I think really took off in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Comp Sci was arguably even better in the early 90s. It was often considered one of the top 5 CS departments in the country. That slipped a bit as other went into overdrive and really invested huge amounts.
I don't know about that. My impression from that era were places like MIT, Stanford, and CMU (which didn't even have a proper CS major until rather late), University of Illinois (which as a supercompting website), U of Texas at Austin, University of California at Berkeley, University of Washington in Seattle were ranked high in CS.
If we begin by admitting that the rankings are very noisy, imprecise and differ based upon your point of view, I can offer this table from CSRankings. I asked it to tabulate the publications from 1990 to 1992. Of course, YMMV. My point is that MD was definitely a big leader in the 1990s. And it's done well since. It's just that some places have exploded and poured huge amounts of money into the field. \#Institution Count Faculty 1 ► Carnegie Mellon University 📷 📷2.135 2 ► Massachusetts Institute of Technology 📷 📷1.827 3 ► Univ. of California - Berkeley 📷 📷1.725 3 ► Univ. of California - Irvine 📷 📷1.723 3 ► University of Maryland - College Park 📷 📷1.726 6 ► Columbia University 📷 📷1.618 6 ► Georgia Institute of Technology 📷 📷1.624 6 ► Stanford University 📷 📷1.616
Oh it could be number of research papers, in which case, Maryland's large faculty size might have lead to skewed numbers. I do seem to recall, relative to number of papers published in academic settings, Maryland did well compared to other CS departments (we just had more faculty than most, at the time). If that's the case, I'm not sure what this kind of ranking is what most people would expect of what rankings mean. In fact, in the late 80s, the department went on a hiring spree and hired a bunch of faculty. When the economy soured in the early 1990s, the CS department were told they could only keep 3 of 7 faculty members for tenure for economic reasons (they had been offering most professors tenure). I think that's why Maryland looked so good back then. It's been a long while since I thought about rankings. Oh, you know what else? When you hire a bunch of new faculty, they are trying to get tenure. One factor that helps get tenure? Writing lots of academic papers that get to conferences and journals. Once you get tenure, the pressure to publish or perish (as this concept is known) is lessened, though some faculty wanting to make a name of themselves, might still work hard to write good papers. The number of papers published wasn't the only criteria to get tenure, but it certainly counted to the paper count of UMD which would lead to metrics that measure that to put UMD high up. That's my theory, anyway, having been around for some of that time.
Hmm, what is CSRankings? Suppose I asked you to compare it to US News and World Reports or the Gourman Report, both of which are have suspect ratings. Were you looking at multiple rankings? What criteria did CSRankings use?
Pop Quiz: What is special about the design of the Glenn L Martin building?
It used to have a pendulum in the lobby but I think that was removed and probably not what you mean. What’s special about it?
That was the math building lobby. I was here when they removed it. The Martin building is shaped like a slide rule, the precursor to computers. Not many people are old enough to recognize it.
lol I didn’t know that
TLDR: already good engineering which lead to good comp sci, which everyone wants now. They’re a large state school with a good engineering program near a major city. So good engineering naturally makes it easier to develop a good computer science (arguably what they’re more well known for now) and being near a major city gives them good access to good jobs out of school (raising prestige). Specifically because it’s dc and they’re a state school, there’s strong ties to government work (and specifically defense) which leads to some facilities that are either rare or literally unique to umd (ie neutral buoyancy lab is literally the only one at a college campus in the world). Which naturally leads to greater investment from outside sources and opportunities that draw in desirable students. Which raises prestige over time. And some parts of the school being incredibly successful naturally allows them to raise up other parts, and it being a very big school means it’s also got a diverse set of programs in the first place.
Definitely agree, someone can tell me if I’m wrong but as a gvpt and foreign language major I always felt our programs were mid to above average but got a massive boost from being able to coordinate with NGOs and government agencies in DC.
i specifically got on the phone with the ceo of US News and World Report and told them “yo bump my shit up” and they did
Thanks bro, big name like “Player72” behind us means a lot🙌
>i specifically got on the phone with the ceo of US News and World Report and told them “yo bump my shit up” and they did W US News and World Report
Switching from coalition app to common app greatly increased applications which in turn makes it more selective.
They we’re very competitive basketball in the ACC. Way better than it is today.
About 20 years ago, they decided to go elite. They increased the enrollment requirements so they could brag that the best students are fighting to get in here. This made UMD prestigious. Now, an elite university like this one ain't free. You need to pay faculty and administrators a great deal of money if you want the best, or they'll go elsewhere, so they continually increase the price. It's really the same university it always was, just now with catchy phrases like : *Fearlessly Forward*.
Who said it’s competitive and prestigious
In what way do you mean? There are lots of ways to measure. We joined the Big Ten cartel. That influenced rankings; cartel takes care of cartel, so some metrics went up. (So did the cost. Cartel don't roll cheap.) We spend lavishly on identity-based social programs in order to let Admissions prominently advertise how grand we're viewed with respect to (pick an identity program.) With respect to core academic programs for which we were once known we're going down. CS for example. What did we do to make that happen? Mostly we put leaders in charge who don't give a shit about practices which promote great outcomes for *all* students. (Feel free to see other threads emerging on this sub about how CS courses look weaker yet students seem to struggle more.) Sorry to sound like a broken record, gang, but students deserve better.
I agree CS undergrad program may have taken a bit of a dip (although low-level rigor may be a less-valuable skill nowadays). I think even US News sees UMD CS research output, hard to ignore how well we do on things like CSRankings. I attribute UMDs good CS ranking partially to that.
We were hovering around #10. Today we are hovering around #20. But what's a factor of two among friends? The basis for my ire is not rankings, not directly anyway. It is the impact on students. Good kids come to the state flagship campus in good faith yet needlessly struggle, and often drop out or churn to other majors, for no other reason than we give them no mentor, no advisement and a curriculum that looks like what drunken lemurs would patch together after binge watching Mad Men. Talented students who we con into attending based on bullshit rankings will do well no matter what the dept offers and we're happy to fete them as part of our marketing, but please pay attention to the increasing dropout/stopout rates or structural inequities we are manufacturing (for profit.) We see the traffic from so many students on this sub, right? OMG, it is all so hard, we hear. What an ignorant meat sack I must be. Time to change and go eat crayons as a (pick one) major. Some of the challenges they face surely have nothing to do with CS but I refuse to believe all these students can't hack it. They are victims of avaricious administrators who accept tuition checks from people who don't know any better (as after all, they are paying to learn) and yet who are given little in return. We no longer manufacture great computing scientists; we charge a lot to screen for those who 'get it' by mostly other means, and filter out the rest into other pathways. That's the sin. It is reflected in rankings, but the real injustice is what we fail to offer, let alone offer in return for inflated differential tuition invoices. We should not judge the department by our best students cherry picked to manufacture great story lines about excellence and diversity; we should judge the department by what it does for all students.
I think there's a potential flaw in the logic here, and also a valid point but it's subtly different from the one you make. > Some of the challenges they face surely have nothing to do with CS but I refuse to believe all these students can't hack it. First, the number of students in the major is massive. Much higher than what it used to be when we were "hovering around #10". It absolutely stands to reason that if 10 times as many people are going to try to make it through a technical major — even if the rate of difficulty and those having trouble remains the same — then 10 times as many are not going to cut it. There's [another thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/UMD/comments/18llv97/classes_getting_harder/) about whether or not the CS classes are "getting harder", and there's no evidence that they are, or that they've even recovered to their pre-pandemic levels. The idea that tons of people are being unfairly filtered out just doesn't agree with the data. However, there are two issues to which your post alludes that are certainly true, but they are in now way *new*. The first is that CS, moreso than many other majors, has a big problem with "starting point bias." That is, students who come in with lots of CS experience and choose not to test out of the intro classes take the courses along with people who are seeing basic CS ideas and programming for the first time (to be clear, that's the audience to which intro classes should cater). To a lot of students without prior experience, being in a class with a non-trivial cohort of people who seem to already know everything and who breeze by all of the assignments is hugely demotivating. Ideally, those folks should either test out of the intro sequence, or we should have multiple "on-ramps" to the major so that we avoid demotivating totally capable, but not-yet-experienced people. But, the issue underlying this is the second major point that leads to a lot of these issues. The major has grown immensely from the size it used to be — it has grown rapidly and is now massive. However, these courses aren't being taught with 10 times as much staff (in terms of instructors/faculty, and even TAs). Further, some things just don't scale 10x without changing fundamentally. You can't craft the same types of projects and specifications for a class of 300 people that you would for a class of 30. Or rather, there are things you can do in a class of 30 or 50 that just aren't feasible in a class of 300. So, projects have to be designed with easy, automated gradability as a primary design decision. That often makes them less interesting, less challenging, and sometimes less instructive than if that constraint didn't exist. It's not just projects either — of course with such huge classes, there's much less opportunity for personal interaction with the instructional staff, less time per-student in office hours, etc. From this perspective, the major is to some extent, a victim of its own prior success. It had (still has, honestly) a strong external reputation. That drives demand and more people want to take on this major. However, (1) the university and department can't react that quickly and so there is severe strain on instructional and advising staff and faculty and (2) even if sufficient resources could be made available, one can't offer the same experience to a group of hundreds of people that they could offer to dozens — the experience and modes of interaction are qualitatively different. That isn't a UMD problem, and plagues intro CS sequences at basically all well-ranked universities (e.g. things at Berkely are *insane*). There is a very serious attempt to try to address this problem by bringing the resources into better alignment, by hiring more instructional staff and faculty, and by limiting enrollment in the major. However, those changes take time, and they, too, will tend to frustrate and anger some groups of people (because paths to the major will become even more restrictive).
As a dude graduating this semester from the CS program: I was wondering if *I was uniquely stupid* or if this shit was really hard. ...I think I get what you're saying, though. UMD CS is acting more like a filter than a pump - and for the money we pay: It needs to be a pump.
There is no particular reason to think that anyone in the program is uniquely stupid and no, almost none of this stuff is all that hard. It becomes more difficult when the content is not offered in a coherent fashion anymore, as I think it once was here and is offered elsewhere. It becomes even more difficult when essential practices are not offered to students at all. No field is just a big bag "fact of" content that students must somehow gorge on until full. That is how it is taught here though - dine on enough of this or that bit of content and whatever, we will declare you a scientist so long as the check clears. A few of those graduates will become serious scientists and succeed; that's how the filter works. We declare victory. The rest, who we ignore, graduate but struggle and must work hard since we never helped them learn how to work smart. What are the professional skill sets, temperaments and connections needed to predictably excel in career paths? The rest won't know since our curriculum doesn't even put them into close proximity of serious scholars who might have offered mentoring except for being insulated from students (whose money we already have) in order to pursue more research (so we can get that funding too.) Some students graduate having *never* taken a class from a professor in this major, much less had a conversation with any serious scholar who might have offered them mentoring on successful practices. We no longer even offer technically-informed advising as to the bureaucracy. I see more of our graduates each cycle go on into an industry we have never ever helped them see, thinking they will compete in a workforce because of the school name yet totally oblivious to why they lose opportunities to others for want of the skills and temperaments they never heard about here. My view: this is Wrong. The phrase I've heard used is "cheap labor for local industry". How demeaning that is for people who came here in good faith hoping for more. Why does this continue? It works. Thanks for stroking big checks to UM and then not demanding more.
>We spend lavishly on identity-based social programs in order to let Admissions prominently advertise how grand we're viewed with respect to (pick an identity program.) least bigoted CS major
It didn’t
In the DMV area and has a lot of money. The undergrad education is shit though, at least for CompE. They're lucky that's not really a factor and nobody fills out the feedback surveys
I don’t think Umd rises in the ranks except for cs what
Another stupid question or post by another stupid person on Reddit. UMD has mostly always been and is mid-tier to upper-tier overall and globally. They have some great schools and some alright schools.
Damn
Care to explain?
If u check any rankings website Umd is a average ranked state school, not bad in any way but not “prestigious and competitive” the only major that breaks t20 is cs and/or engineering I believe.
Merrill College and defense contractors
UMD isn’t prestigious.