A friend has a choice of sending a son either to Drexel or Boston University to get a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering. Which would be the better choice in terms of academic quality and likely amount of learning to be acquired? How about productive social life? (Partying doesn’t count in favor of a school since the person making the choice is the parent, not the child.) If you say “School X is better”, please quantify how much more you think it would be worth to attend that school over four years, e.g., “Caltech is better than MIT for the following reasons … and I would be willing to pay $34,000 extra over four years for my kid to attend Caltech.”
[I have some of my own opinions, but will save them for a few days so as not to prejudice comments. Comments from alumni with information about the academic experience at either school would be welcome.]
Cost of Drexel tuition = $55,335 x 4 = $221,340
Cost of BU tuition = $54,130 x 4 = $216,520
Cost of hanging out in parents’ basement/at hacker collectives, learning Python and dreaming up a million-dollar web service or two: $0
[Figures assume that tuition doesn’t rise in the next four years, which is unlikely.]
We’ve hired students from both schools. I have a preference for Drexel because of the co-op program. In general, getting work experience makes students better prepared for graduation. BU has Comp Eng and Comp Sci in two spearate faculties which leads to less cross pollination. For example, the Comp Sci career fair is lumped in with Humanities.
We’ve interviewed many Comp Eng grads who found many of their hardware courses of limited value to employers and end up focusing more on software.
I’m more interested in why it is constrained to those two – omitting places like Illinois, Carnegie-Mellon, etc.
Clarification question: is money a factor at all? I would have thought that BU would have been more expensive but apparently not. I’d like that both schools are marginal private institutions and you’d be better off sending the kid to a public school (eg Virginia Tech, Case Western) and giving him $100k when he graduates.
Tim, Patrick: The kid has been admitted to these two schools and has until May 1 to choose between them.
I graduated from Drexel with my BS in Architectural Engineering. I’m not really familiar with BU’s program, but since both programs are ABET accredited the actual coarse material should be very similar.
The main difference is that Drexel has the Co-Op program. Real work experience is priceless when you’re looking for a job. With that said, because of the Co-Op, Drexel’s program is 5 years long. That’s an extra year of tuition.
Given the two choices I would have to go with Drexel. However, it has been my experience that employers don’t care as much about where you went to school as they do about real work experience. If this student could find a cheaper school, with an ABET accredidation, that has a good Co-Op or internship program, I would recomend that.
I graduated from Drexel with my BS in Architectural Engineering. I’m not really familiar with BU’s program, but since both programs are ABET accredited the actual coarse material should be very similar.
The main difference is that Drexel has the Co-Op program. Real work experience is priceless when you’re looking for a job. With that said, because of the Co-Op, Drexel’s program is 5 years long. That’s an extra year of tuition.
Given the two choices I would have to go with Drexel. However, it has been my experience that employers don’t care as much about where you went to school as they do about real work experience. If this student could find a cheaper school, with an ABET accredidation, that has a good Co-Op or internship program, I would recomend that.
I agree with David – the co-op program at drexel provides the student with work experience that can’t be duplicated in a classroom. A student graduating from Drexel with a 5-year degree typically has a total of 18 months of experience with up to three different companies. The co-op program really helps students figure out what career path they want to pursue.
For the social aspect, both schools are located in metropolitan areas with lots of other college students and things to do. It just depends on if they would rather live in boston or philly.
Option #3: Use the $225k to get the kid an apartment building he can live in and manage part-time while he spends his other free 90 hours/week self-teaching himself through participating in open source projects, downloading free lectures, reading books, attending public lectures and maybe taking a course here and there to cover the really difficult stuff. Then sit back and watch him build a software company out of his apartment while using the rental income as operating capital.
Joe, Mike.. The kid wants to study computer engineering, not software development. Or at least he thinks he does. Or at least we’re given to expect that he thinks he does.
What you’re suggesting is a bit like asking him to become an oceanographer by taking a few years to go surfing.
On the other hand, if he just wants to build software and maybe a business, then I agree that higher ed has little to offer except a framework as a substitute for self-discipline. I value a grounding in compsci fundamentals as much as anyone when I’m hiring, but I agree that a smart and interested kid can acquire superior employable skills on their own.
Not an alumni, but my cousin lives in the Lehigh Valley and originally chose Drexel for architecture. From a student-living perspective, the second he saw the surrounding areas, he decided to screw that, save the money, and just go to LaFayette College a few miles away instead. If given only those two schools, he’d probably go Boston instantly.
I also second Mike’s option since a friend of mine did the exact same thing and is current working at Rockstar Games (i.e., doing the exact opposite of all my university friends working boring ass jobs in the suburbs).
I don’t know how it is now, but when I co-op’d you didn’t have to pay tuition for your semesters working. So, it took 5 years to get a degree but cost only 4 years of tuition. And, of course, the co-op job provided funding to pay for those 4 years.
I didn’t go to Drexel or BU, though.
Well, I would suggest BU. Considering there seems to be not much difference in the two schools, he might as well stay in Boston and utilize his parents social network to get good internships around Boston. Also he can do research at MIT, Harvard via an REU etc if he is really interested. It would be easier for him to continue the research if he is Boston, as compared to Philadelphia.
Andrew—agreed, the fundamentals are indispensable. The question is: does he need to pay $200,000+ to learn them? There’s nothing secret about the content of the undergrad CS or CE curriculum. MIT has OCW. Princeton has the complete slide decks, assignments, reading lists, and exams of its core CS classes online. Other universities doubtlessly do, too.
If you just wanted to learn the core undergrad CS/CE curriculum, you could follow these courses from home and pay a U.S.-based computer science PhD student $100 an hour (probably *well* above market rate) for evaluation and in-person tutoring if you got stuck. A foreign PhD student tutoring over Skype could be less expensive.
Can a student at BU attend/audit MIT or Harvard classes/seminars? (I know that grad students from Harvard and MIT circulate more or less freely between the schools, but I don’t know what the rule is for undergraduates.) If so, and assuming that there are some classes worth taking at these two top-flight institutions, wouldn’t BU allow for a broader set of choices, instruction-wise?
On the other hand, access to libraries, books, hacker forums, and free open-source software may make the broader set of choices pretty irrelevant.
Cheers,
JCS
Anonymous wrote “since both programs are ABET accredited the actual coarse material should be very similar.” Ha! Obviously written by someone who is not deeply familiar with ABET accreditation. I’ve been closely involved with ABET accreditation at my university, and trust me, it is no guarantee of quality. ABET accreditation is CERTAINLY not a guarantee that a course at any ABET-accredited university will be equivalent to a course at any other ABET-accredited university; nothing is farther from the close, and I doubt even ABET would make such an absurd claim.
Personally, I would not take ABET accreditation into account when assessing quality. I think it tells you very little. Instead, go by things like reputation among graduates and among companies who are hiring, as well as by the cost of the program, the satisfaction level of current students, and how smart and hard-working the current students are (since the kid will learn a lot from his/her fellow students, both substantively as well as in work habits).
Drexel is right next to Penn (University of Pennsylvania). I was at Drexel for grad school ten years ago, and there was some sharing between the two schools. As I recall, Drexel students could use the Penn library, at least for some services. There might be a setup where a Drexel student can take some Penn courses as well, and vice versa. It’s worth checking out to see if that’s still going on. Penn’s resources are valuable. And he should visit the ENIAC museum if he does go to Philadelphia.
Also, Philadelphia is an under-rated city, and it’s a lot cheaper to live here than in Boston.
Jose: As far as I know, there is minimal interaction among undergraduates from MIT, Harvard, and BU (certainly I never met a BU student in any of the MIT EECS courses that I attended or taught (sample size: approximately 2500 students)). BU is not listed among the schools with which MIT has an exchange program (see http://web.mit.edu/catalog/overv.chap3-acad.html ). Wellesley is the school for which a full exchange exists. http://web.mit.edu/catalog/overv.chap4-other.html shows that for graduate students, an exchange program exists centered on the African Studies program at BU.
I’m curious: is the education at BU/Drexel really worth the premium over what it costs to study the same thing at Enormous State University?
Granted, building connections with well placed students and faculty counts for a lot, but so does $200K+
J and others: The cost will be more than $200K at BU, but Drexel has offered a discount and will be $72,000 cheaper over four years. I could have asked “Is BU worth $72,000 more than Drexel?” but did not want to prejudice comments.
Perhaps a more inclusive formulation would be “Is BU and the Boston experience worth $72k more than Drexel and Philadelphia experience?”
In hindsight I should have figured that MIT/Halberd would limit outside interaction, otherwise their “exclusive image” might not hold. On the other hand, there’s probably a lot of free seminars/lectures/talks at either that a BU student could attend. (Possibly the same at U Penn, but it’s 2 against 1.)
Leaving MIT/Hahvahd off the table, there are 39 meetups listed for “Computers” in Boston and 14 in Philadelphia, for example. There’s [or there used to be; haven’t been to B-town in five years or so] a lot of technology companies in Boston; are there similar numbers or opportunities in Phil? (I have no idea, since I never lived there.)
Just broadening the bracketing of the question.
Cheers,
JCS
Interesting question. I work on the West Coast for a company that hires computer engineers. Rather than offer my own opinion, I asked a several managers who hire fresh outs. The consensus is that BU is perceived as the better choice, and would look better on the resume. One who disagreed emphasized that a Master’s in EE or Comp Eng, especially from a California school (UCLA, Stanford, Berkeley) would be perceived as much more important than where your friend’s son went to undergrad, and if he likes Drexel a little better, he should go there.
to be really frugal attend something like Kiev Polytechnic Institute (tuition in English + room and board for less than $6k/year). Masters degree in 5 years. There is no catch. He would still have to do on the job learning after graduation just like after BU or any other elite american school.
My son is attending BU this coming fall (in CS), over other places that offer some grants/discount.
Here is my thinking:
1) It is in Boston. There are just way more job opportunities here. Google is here, Microsoft is here, and worst case, Philg will get him a job, right?!
2) It is the connections. My social network is here.
3) It is the faculty. Many of them are MIT graduates anyway.
4) It will be cheaper. Just added up the cost of several trips, specially Thanksgiving and Christmas airfares. Cost of storage during summer, etc.
> Kiev Polytechnic Institute
Can anyone comment on whether a typical American CS student is likely to be more or less successful with members of the appropriate sex in Kyiv vs. Boston/Philly? I don’t know about philg’s friend’s kid, but if I were he, I would definitely factor that in.
Joe: Here in the U.S., it is hard to imagine any major that would make a young man less attractive to young women than CS/CE. A Boston location makes the problem much worse because female undergraduates from all schools can choose from Harvard business school students, Harvard law school students, Harvard medical school students, etc.
It does seem plausible that young women in Kiev would be more likely to warm up to a man with a U.S. passport and some tech skills.
Any chance the young man might decide to study something else (physics, economics, philosophy, etc.) once he gets on campus? In this case, a broader evaluation of the respective universities may be worthwhile.