Cloud Hosting

BlueSky Ranking of Computer Science Rankings 2022/23

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI received his first computer at the age of eight. He studied computer science at Stanford University, but dropped out after one year to co-found Loopt, a social networking application that was sold a few years later for $43.4 million.

He became a partner and then president at Y Combinator, the startup accelerator which has supported Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Quora, Stripe and more than 4,000 other companies with a combined valuation of more than $600 billion by January 2023.

In 2020, he left Y Combinator to focus full-time on OpenAI as CEO, and since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 we have been talking about little else.

Now is the best time to start a career in tech, he said to an audience last week at the Technological University of Munich, Germanys top-ranked institution for computer science and engineering.

So whats the secret to kickstart your career in tech? For many the journey begins with studies in computer science, now one of the hottest majors on campus with the promise of six-figure starting salaries that used to be the preserve of MBAs.

BlueSky Thinking has compiled the Ranking of Computer Science Rankings 2023, aggregating the results of the four major global subject rankings published every year by Times Higher Education (THE), QS, US News and ARWU (Shanghai).

You can view the results for the worlds top 50 universities for computer science here.

While U.S. universities fill the top four places, and Harvard, Princeton, Cornell and U Washington also make the top 15, institutions in Europe, Canada and Asia Pacific represent close to 60% of the worlds top 50.

BlueSky Ranking of Computer Science Rankings 2022/23

Each university subject ranking uses a distinct methodology and measures different things with the inherent limitations of each assessment, so doing particularly well in one ranking and less well in another is reflected in the overall performance.

The University of Oxford is ranked #1 in the world by THE, but only #11 by US News, while Chinas Tsinghua University is ranked #1 by US News but only #15 by QS. But all four rankings consistently rate MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon at the top.

However, they cannot agree on the University of Cambridge, the alma mater of Alan Turing who is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. There are over 300 companies started by computer science and technology graduates and staff of the university, and research that continues to lead the field.

Though Cambridge is ranked #6 in computer science by THE and #7 by QS, US News has them at #41 and ARWU Shanghai only #62.

According to compensation data company, Payscale the average base salary in the U.S. with a Masters in computer science is $109k per year, quickly rising based on seniority. And demand is there. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that the worlds tech talent shortage will swell to more than 85 million tech workers by 2030.

Thats just as well, because tuition of a Computer Science program from one of the leading schools in the US can be over $60,000 per year. In Europe salaries are lower, but beyond the elite universities there are new entrants in Higher Education, such as the Open Institute of Technology (OPIT) that have brought together faculty from the likes of the University of Michigan, Northwestern and McGill to offer a BSc in Computer Science and a MSc in Applied Data Science & AI for as little as 300 per month. As an EU-accredited institution, international students will be able to apply for jobs in the EU, with salaries to match.

The Future Of Learning - Online Innovation For A Career In Tech

So now is a great time to start a career in tech, as OpenAIs Sam Altman insists. In his case, Altman never finished his undergrad at Stanford, joining an illustrious of computer science dropouts that include Mark Zuckerburg who left Harvard in his sophomore year to dedicate his time to Facebook, and Bill Gates who walked away from devising algorithms for pancake sorting as part of his mathematics and graduate level computer science courses at Harvard to start a software company with Paul Allen that is now Microsoft.

Now is the best time to start a career in tech. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and founder of ChatGPT ... [+] (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

When explaining his decision to leave Harvard, Gates said "if things hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on leave."

That wasnt quite the case for Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak who was expelled from the University of Colorado, Boulder for hacking the universitys computer system. He later transferred to UC Berkeley, where Steve Jobs would visit him a few times a week. Wozniak dropped out of college soon after, this time to start a business together.

But for every entrepreneurial tech superstar who never finished school, there are plenty of others that used their computer science studies to incredible effect. While studying computer engineering at the University of Michigan, the co-founder of Google Larry Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks. Meanwhile, his future business partner Sergey Brin was completing his computer science undergrad at the University of Maryland. They would both go on to get their MSc computer science at Stanford, and from there begin a computer science Ph.D., co-authoring a paper titled, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Dorm rooms became laboratories and offices, and the rest is history.

Ginni Rometty, the former chairman and CEO of IBM the first woman to head the company - graduated with high honors from Northwestern University with a bachelors degree in computer science and electrical engineering. This was the same combination of majors for Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon who graduated from Princeton in 1986.

Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix was rejected from his first-choice MIT, and obtained a Masters in Computer Science at Stanford in 1988, a decade before the former CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer. The co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, Drew Houston was offered a place to study computer science at MIT and it was there that he met his future business partner, Arash Ferdowsi.

But for Barbara Liskov, whose pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing was recognized with the 2008 Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, her graduate school application to Princeton was unsuccessful as the Ivy League school did not accept female students in mathematics. In March 1968 she became one of the first women in the U.S. to be awarded a Ph.D. from a computer science department when she was awarded her degree from Stanford University.

Anita Borg is celebrated for advocating for womens representation and professional advancement in technology, and founded the Institute for Women and Technology and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Borg was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science by NYU in 1981.

The presence - or absence - of women in the computing and technological fields, as students, ... [+] inventors, creators and educators, will define our technological future. Anita Borg, Institute for Women and Technology (Photo by Jerry Telfer/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Outside the U.S., Ma Huateng (Pony Ma), co-founder and CEO of Tencent, one of the most valuable companies in Asia, received a BSc in computer science from Shenzen University. He is the first citizen from China to enter Forbes top 10 richest list.

And when it comes to widely-used programming languages, Python was created by Guido Van Rossum who computer science at the University of Amsterdam, while University of Calgary and Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist, James Gosling founded and led the design of Java.

And if you do fancy combining undergraduate studies with an MBA, look no further than Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft who headed to the U.S. from India to study computer science at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and then got his MBA from Chicago Booth. There is also Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of Yelp with a BS computer engineering from Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

And lets not forget that Jimmy Fallon, the late-night talk show host was originally a computer science major at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York before switching to communications in his senior year.

So what about you? Whether at one of the worlds top 50 computer sciences schools, or a more affordable online alternative, are you ready to start your career in tech?

Original post:

BlueSky Thinking Ranking of Computer Science Rankings 2022/23 - Forbes