Students who want to study and get a degree in coding can get stumped over which university to attend. Plenty of universities in the United States have been improving their computer science programs but which of those schools guarantee a high-paying job and excellent education quality for students?
HackerRank, a technology company, carried out a University Rankings Competition to determine which of the 126 computer science schools produce the top coders. More than 5,000 individuals participated in HackerRank's competition.
The best coders in the U.S. hail from University of California, Berkeley, according to HackerRank's best coding school list. It was followed by the Georgia Institute of Technology at top two, then University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ohio State University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Washington; University of California, Irvine; North American University, University of Southern California, and University of California (UCLA), Los Angeles at the tenth spot.
Some of HackerRank's findings were similar to the U.S. News & World Report's best computer science schools list. The latter's best coding school is also the University of California, Berkeley but the top one ranking was given to Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University as well. The last three universities weren't included in HackerRank's list, though.
As for the reason behind this, the company said that the criteria for the U.S. News & World Report's findings don't include "practical coding skills." The methodology of the U.S. News & World Report included the "number of research papers produced, global research reputation and number of conferences," and these aren't enough.
HackerRank's data also determined the best coding schools in the world. The top three are ITMO University in Russia, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Middle School in China, and Ho Chi Minh City University of Science in Vietnam. University of California, Berkeley -- the number one coding school in America -- placed at the fourth spot overall.
In other news, Google recently negated the learning experiences of coding boot camp graduates. Maggie Johnson, Google's director of education and university relations, told Bloomberg that "most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry."
It's not just coding boot camp graduates who struggle upon entering the technology workforce. Computer science majors who graduated from four-year colleges also need extra training in the early stages of their careers. Graduates from four-year colleges, however, have a better knowledge of coding concepts than those from boot camps.
Coding boot camps are short programs offered by private firms. Only select parts of programming are taught, usually those with the largest impact and relevance to the market.
