Computer Science School Rankings: They Are Important
Many factors go into figuring computer science school rankings. Most are subject to the opinions of the person wanting to take the class - do they have a large student body, or is it fairly small? How long is the program to get a degree? Does the faculty have a high reputation? Another important factor is the cost of the program, and how much funding and student support they offer to offset that.
Almost more important than any of that is where the focus of the program is - writing software, building networks, or research is just a few of the possibilities.
School rankings, especially computer science school rankings, are not necessarily reflective of a school's ability to teach students. They typically indicate quality of research, as well as how good the faculty is at research, and how much donations they receive from alumni. However, this is not to say that computer science school rankings are invalid, they are excellent tools for getting a summary of what kind of learning and research environment you will be in.
Several factors go into computer science school rankings. U.S. News & World Report, one of the most widely-regarded school ranking publications, uses several categories to come up with an overall score. Some of the categories are graduation and retention rates, peer assessment, faculty resources, student admissions criteria, graduating performance, and donations and other financial resources. Other computer science school rankings are based on the opinions of those in the community, the average earning of graduates when compared to the cost of education. Other, far more inaccurate rankings are created by people voting or being polled. This is inaccurate because a voter's opinion can be easily influenced by unrelated things, such as that school's football team winning a tournament. This is not always a bad thing, however. Reputation can affect how an employer views a potential employee's school. It is important to not just look at a school's ranking. There is much more to schools than a value of one to five. Looking at the school's website, areas of research and even visiting the campus if possible are all quality supplements to a computer science school ranking. According to U.S. News & World Report, the three schools with the highest computer science school ranking are Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and University of California - Berkeley. MIT scored the highest with 4.9 out of 5. The total cost per year is around $45,000 a year, with a medium student body. It is a highly selective private institution in an urban setting. Stanford scored a 4.7, tying Berkeley. Stanford costs around as much as MIT, but has a larger student body and is set in a suburban setting. It is also private and highly selective. Berkeley costs around $22,000 for in-state students and $40,000 for out-of-state. It has a very large student body set in an urban environment. It is the only public institution out of the three, but is just as selective. While rankings can provide valuable insight into how a college is operated, student participation after graduation, it cannot replace hands on experience and further reading. Computer science school rankings can help narrow down the schools you would want to go for, making the job of further investigation much easy.
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