Yes, this. It is not really about public vs private schools. I resisted commenting for a day but now I have to. I don't even know how to compare Stanford & Berkeley CS
Berkeley has way more students, most of which are on campus. It is nearly impossible to reserve space as a TA or instructor to do class-related activities. When I was at Stanford I could reserve a room for office hours pretty easily
Stanford CS has a huge professional masters program (and also a class-based masters program). Berkeley CS's MS is small and research-based. At Berkeley, undergrads & grads take different CS classes, while Stanford mixes ugrads & grads, requiring less teaching staff overall
Also Stanford seemed to have more adjunct faculty from industry who taught classes in 2-3 year stints. For ex: compilers and databases courses 2018-202?
Bc of the large frac of students not on campus at Stanford, pre pandemic they invested in the infra to run most CS classes remotely. And way more people in Stanford CS classes than Berkeley classes' are getting As. It is easier to say I ran a class when everyone passes by default
But when everyone passes by default, they aren't required to understand what is going on in the classes. When I interviewed DS and MLE, I was surprised at the fraction of Stanford grads who could not answer a variant of "what's a difference between a linear model & NN"
The burdens of scale almost always fall on the intro course lecturers and TA staff. At Stanford the head TAs for many CS classes were underappreciated. Many of my old profs delivered lectures and that's it. Maybe wrote 1 exam. Haven't been TAing at Berkeley long enough to compare
I don't blame the profs. They are overworked and have a bunch of expectations to meet. Running a class is a full time job, very easy to mess up & very hard to get right. Family, advising 10+ students, submitting 15+ papers/year, running 1-2 startups are each full time jobs
Also lecturers are not paid enough at any school, not just Berkeley. The original tweet about Berkeley capping the CS major thoughtfully articulated this IMO
I think it's just really hard to scale CS education to the rate the demand for CS-related jobs is growing. I find it hard to say one school is inherently better at this than the other. They're both really different approaches/styles
Sorry this thread is rife with typos; was walking & typing. Am also sleep-deprived
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