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The CS program for undergrad in Havard is exactly the same as your closer public college I'm sympathetic to your signaling point of view, but this statement is

by harryh 7y ago

The CS program for undergrad in Havard is exactly the same as your closer public college I'm sympathetic to your signaling point of view, but this statement is definitely wrong. CS curriculum varies a lot between the top schools and a typical public university. For example I just now looked at the labs for Operating Systems at University of North Carolina and compared that to the work I did at CMU. UNC has students implement malloc and free. At CMU I implemented a process scheduler and virtual memory system.

JoshuaJB 7y ago
(Disclaimer: I'm a PhD student in real-time operating systems at UNC.) Each program has its own strengths, and simply comparing between similarly titled classes is an unfortunately poor metric. (Eg. At UNC, OS is really an introduction to C and OS concepts class. The Operating System Implementations class sounds more similar to CMU's OS Class.) Academic programs need to be compared holistically, and only if one is consistently worse than the other do you have an answer. (Otherwise I could go and claim that UNC is better than CMU because our real-time group is much better.) Of course, that's too much analysis for most people (including me), so I would argue that looking at where graduates work is typically an okay proxy for undergraduate educational quality.
- harryh 7y ago
  I fully admit that my entire understanding of the UNC curriculum is what I just gathered in 5 minutes of googling/reading. So ya, just comparing labs from similarly named classes is definitely not the best methodology. That being said I've spent a lot of time in my career recruiting students out of undergrad. And I've noticed significantly more rigor and in depth work from students from some of the top schools compared to most everywhere else.
hyperbovine 7y ago
But CMU has one of the greatest CS departments in the world. Harvard does not.
throwawayjava 7y ago
And UNC is a top tier CS school, not even close to representative of "local branch campus". My undergrad OS course didn't even have us implement malloc or free... CMU's sophomore systems course is a lot more rigorus, let alone their OS course. And that's in systems courses where the variance is actually a lot smaller than in other subfields. There was simply no course in my undergraduate institutions curriculum where you could learn what a Turing machine or even DFA was! We never saw real asymptotic complexity analysis (our algorithms course spent most of the semester reviewing basic data structures as interview prep). Obviously no AI or ML course. Even where there was coverage the material covered was so different. For example, the PL course was all about using a functional PL and didn't include any of the type theory, logic programming, language implementation work, etc. It was a watered down version of SICP, which is an intro course. If you think the difference in quality between UNC and CMU is large, consider the massive difference between branch campuses and top-ranked public research universities. For all practical purposes, "CS" means something very different at regional branch campuses than at top tier research universities like UNC and CMU.

by harryh 7y ago

JoshuaJB 7y ago

(Disclaimer: I'm a PhD student in real-time operating systems at UNC.) Each program has its own strengths, and simply comparing between similarly titled classes is an unfortunately poor metric. (Eg. At UNC, OS is really an introduction to C and OS concepts class. The Operating System Implementations class sounds more similar to CMU's OS Class.) Academic programs need to be compared holistically, and only if one is consistently worse than the other do you have an answer. (Otherwise I could go and claim that UNC is better than CMU because our real-time group is much better.) Of course, that's too much analysis for most people (including me), so I would argue that looking at where graduates work is typically an okay proxy for undergraduate educational quality.

harryh 7y ago
I fully admit that my entire understanding of the UNC curriculum is what I just gathered in 5 minutes of googling/reading. So ya, just comparing labs from similarly named classes is definitely not the best methodology. That being said I've spent a lot of time in my career recruiting students out of undergrad. And I've noticed significantly more rigor and in depth work from students from some of the top schools compared to most everywhere else.

hyperbovine 7y ago

But CMU has one of the greatest CS departments in the world. Harvard does not.

throwawayjava 7y ago

And UNC is a top tier CS school, not even close to representative of "local branch campus". My undergrad OS course didn't even have us implement malloc or free... CMU's sophomore systems course is a lot more rigorus, let alone their OS course. And that's in systems courses where the variance is actually a lot smaller than in other subfields. There was simply no course in my undergraduate institutions curriculum where you could learn what a Turing machine or even DFA was! We never saw real asymptotic complexity analysis (our algorithms course spent most of the semester reviewing basic data structures as interview prep). Obviously no AI or ML course. Even where there was coverage the material covered was so different. For example, the PL course was all about using a functional PL and didn't include any of the type theory, logic programming, language implementation work, etc. It was a watered down version of SICP, which is an intro course. If you think the difference in quality between UNC and CMU is large, consider the massive difference between branch campuses and top-ranked public research universities. For all practical purposes, "CS" means something very different at regional branch campuses than at top tier research universities like UNC and CMU.