Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

> The best program anywhere in the United States is the computer science major at the California Institute of Technology

That's interesting because in most rankings I've seen of US CS programs Caltech's comes in around 5-10 from the top.

Which ones rank above Caltech depends on the particular organization doing the rankings, but schools that in at least some well known lists place above Caltech in CS include CMU, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Tech, U of Washington, Princeton, UT Austin, Harvey Mudd, Harvard, UCLA.

That a CS program is the best investment monetarily is not surprising, but I would have expected it to one of the higher ranked programs from a school better known for CS.

I wonder if the small sample size distorts the figures. Caltech has only ~220 undergrad students per year (across all majors). And it seems there are two similar majors split up into separate rows.

1; California Institute of Technology; Computer and Information Sciences, General; $4,409,147

22; California Institute of Technology; Computer Science; $2,812,200

Before the early 2000s there wasn’t a separate CS major, just a related concentration within Engineering and Applied Science (which is what the degree was awarded in) IIRC

You might want to ask Caltech CS majors about this, I wasn’t one but I took a few CS classes when I was there and they definitely lacked an OS class, for example.

Among other things, the state schools are cheaper.

That said, Caltech is a surprising choice.

Campus proximity to Bay Area.

That was my guess, too. I would liked to have seen the ROI adjusted for cost-of-living, but I suspect that's a lot of work to get that data and integrate it into the analysis.

Is it really close enough to the Bay Area to make a difference? It's in the Los Angeles area. It's about a 7 hour drive from Caltech to San Francisco.

Fair point. And there's Stanford too..

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