What are the best US colleges for software engineering? Is a bachelor's degree in computer science acceptable to become a software engineer, or is it better to get a bachelor's in software engineering specifically?

I live in Texas, so an in-state school (such as UT) would be great.

Currently, I my top 3 colleges are:
University of Texas at Austin
Rice University
Rochester Institute of Technology

I know others such as MIT, Caltech, and Stanford are also great, but very selective and very expensive.

I don't really believe that software engineering is that competitive a field, college-wise, and your choices actually seem very good. I believe Voy is at RIT, so you might want to ask him about that. And I want to say that MA is at UTA, but I'm not 100% sure. And Rice, well, I just heard it kicks ass.

You can probably do software engineering with a computer science degree (there's likely a huge overlap), but as long as you know what you want to do, I don't see a reason why you shouldn't pick software engineering in the first place.

The one thing I'd focus on is price. Rutgers University in New Jersey is subsidized by the state and tuition rates for in-state students are low or nonexistent. Is there anything of the kind for University of Texas?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 11 2011, 4:48 am by Centreri.

If you have the opportunity to do software engineering instead of computer science, and your goal is to actually get a job writing commercial software and not go into academia or further research (medical, geographic, super computing or physics etc), then do software engineering. The course actually needs to be good though; a good comp sci degree would be better than a lame software engineering one.

Yes, I do go to the University of Texas at Austin. Ray you should come here, it's EPIC. Although I'm graduating this semester.

Most colleges and universities do not offer a degree specifically called software engineering as usually it would be a discipline of another field, like Electrical engineering or something. If you want to go into software engineering or development, you can do either Computer Engineering or Science. Just make sure when you take your technical courses and electives that you have sufficient knowledge and skills in the software department.

When you look at the job requirements for any software engineering or developer position, they don't care what major you are - they only care about if you have the sufficient coding skills, working experience, and/or knowledge to fulfill the job. Every software position has different skill sets required but typically computer science and electrical/computer engineers are best at preparing students for various tasks. And yes, UT Austin is a good place to get such degrees, the Cockrell School of Engineering is one of the best in the nation.

While it's true that if you get a job they just look at your degree and say "yeah, good enough", I myself did a Bachelors of Science majoring in Computer Science. Out of all of the courses I did, the ones in C programming and the two Software Engineering courses (1 with a full-year team project) were the most useful for me. The more theoretical things like finite-state automata, AI and information theory, not so much. A year or two after I left they began offering a degree in Software Engineering, which I really would've liked to have done. I believe it was a joint course run by the computer science and electrical engineering departments.

The ones I know off the top of my head are Cornell, Carnegie Melon, MIT, Stanford, and DigiPen. I'm sure we all know which one I recommend the most (if you can code a video game from scratch you can code anything).

If I can avoid plugging mine, you can avoid plugging yours.

And all of those (with the exception of yours) are probably too selective. Possibly not Carnegie-Mellon; I would actually recommend checking it out, but I believe they're expensive.

I don't even go there... It's not mine. I don't even have solid plans to attend. I just know much more about the school than you. You can't even possibly know how selective the school is or isn't :l

As soon as I saw this:



I made a hundred mineral bet with myself... that the discussion in this topic, from the point at which you had posted, would involve DigiPen. I was right. I am therefore owed minerals.

I have a general question for everyone asking about anything concerning US colleges...have any of you looked up the Princeton Review?

As soon as I saw this:



I made a hundred mineral bet with myself... that the discussion in this topic, from the point at which you had posted, would involve someone mentioning you bringing up DigiPen, and I that would consider that spam since you have a right to mention DigiPen as it is a credible school. I was right. I am therefore owed minerals.


I know a lot of people who go to USC (University of Southern California, not University of South Carolina) for software development and love it. Apparently their program is fantastic. It is expensive and not in Texas, though.

That may or may not be true, but I'm pretty sure that the average HR minion scanning resumes would see "Bachelor of Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation from DigiPen", be confused and wonder why someone with a games degree is applying for their job to write business-critical applications, and chuck it out.

On the other hand, their "Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering" looks decent.

I'm pretty sure anyone hiring a software engineer would understand what that means.

LOL. You have no idea.

Actually I do. I mean how would all the graduates get jobs so easily if what you said were true.

And you're an expert? Come on.

If you're going to get hired for a programming position, you aren't going to interview with some recruiting person who doesn't know what they're looking for in an applicant. You'll interview with someone who understands what they're looking for, and therefore has an understanding of degree terminology.

Fuck yeah son, come party it up at RIT with me.

EDIT: In all seriousness, I do recommend RIT, we have a great SE program. If you have any questions about the school, just ask.

I also looked quite closely at Carnegie Mellon when I was applying to colleges, so I'd recommend them (as others have). They are indeed quite expensive though. I don't know where you live, but I know Carnegie Mellon has an overnight stay program where you can attend classes for a day and live in the dorms - it was a big help to me.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 11 2011, 10:04 pm by Voyager7456.

Carnegie Mellon is definitely something you should add to your list - academically, they have a good program focused a little more on software engineering rather than theoretical computer science. They are, however, pretty expensive if you don't qualify for need-based aid. But then so are most private schools.

That being said, anything with a big name in the field is probably the most important. Most software engineering/IT jobs don't require college-level skills in programming, unless you're talking about getting a job at Apple, Google, etc. It does, however, give you a leg up in the job market if you have a shiny degree from a top university and/or contacts in the company, even if your skills are going to be underutilized (read: hedge fund sysadmin).

It's not a matter of getting to the interview, it's a matter of getting your resume past the HR monkey who doesn't know anything about programming and is just making sure your resume matches their criteria. Sometimes even then the interviews (possibly just the first round) are conducted by people who really don't know what they should be looking for in candidates.

I knew you guys wouldn't trust me saying you had no clue, so I got some comments from Slashdot. These are just the first I found - feel free to read all of the comments in the thread for a better perspective. These sorts of comments come up on *every* *single* *story* slashdot ever runs about hiring practices in IT, and pretty often on stories only tangentially related to hiring.


http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1779942&cid=33502700
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1779942&cid=33502704
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1779942&cid=33502932
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1779942&cid=33505642


1. Where did I say this was universal?
2. If graduates are specifically applying for places that design games, then obviously a game-designing degree is going to be recognised by a game-developing company. The same is not true of a game-designing degree being recognised by your average corporate software house.
3. A lot of placements from universities are from businesses who have distinct relationships with the university, or from employers that go to universities specifically to hire people. Again this is not the same as taking your degree (that maybe you earned 10 years ago) and applying for companies who know nothing about your university.

Sounds like perhaps just simply you don't understand the terminology? RTIS is not a design degree at all, and you don't even take a single design class in the degree. And, of course DigiPen has great industry contacts as well as recruitment sessions that visit the campus, which in effect would bypass some moron in human relations. Although, who cares. If you go to DigiPen and bypass these morons you claim to exist, then why mention them in the first place?